


I can fly as long as I'm with you

by unnieunnie



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Happy Ending, Hardcore camping, M/M, Many woodland creatures become dinner, Mind Meld, More emotions than make-outs, Non-Graphic Violence, Psychic Bond, Shapeshifter!jongdae, Shapeshifting, Slow Burn, Soldier!minseok, Soldiers, Wartime
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-28
Updated: 2019-11-28
Packaged: 2020-06-24 02:58:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 29,995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19714873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unnieunnie/pseuds/unnieunnie
Summary: His country had been at war his whole life, but Minseok had found a purpose in training for the Air Scouts. There was nothing he wanted more than to partner with one of the beautiful creatures who stepped out of the sky. For years, he had waited to be chosen.Nothing could've prepared him for Jongdae.





	I can fly as long as I'm with you

**Author's Note:**

> Dear prompter (T119):
> 
> I made a complete fool of myself to snag this prompt, and then I went and made it all fantasy while your original prompt was more science fiction. I hope it's what you wanted! Writing this took over my brain completely, and I had so much fun with it. Thank you for the excellent prompt!
> 
> \--------
> 
> I read a whole book on falconry for this story, and I am not sorry about it.
> 
> PLEASE NOTE: Raptors are obligate carnivores, and Minseok & Jongdae are Manly Men in the Wilderness. There's a lot of catchin' & eatin' meat in this fic, if you have strong feelings of vegetarianism, please read with caution.
> 
> ___________________

Minseok shaded his eyes with one hand to watch Yixing and Joohyun fly in. He would never tire of watching airlings. They flew with more grace than birds, as if those uncanny minds of theirs lent them an even keener understanding of air currents or some such. And Minseok had watched enough of them come into camp over the past 3 years that he could tell from Yixing’s circling where he would land and therefore where Joonmyun was. Minseok jogged over, glad of his rank as Joonmyun’s adjutant to disguise that all he was interested in was gossip.

Another thing he never tired of: watching the miracle of an airling shifting form. Yixing and Joohyun banked backward, Joohyun closer to the ground, their forms lengthening as if their feet reached for the ground, each of them stepping smoothly out of the sky at the completion of their change.

Joonmyun and Seungwan were there, of course, with clothing for their partners. Minseok could hardly remember his embarrassment when he first entered training, upon seeing airlings change the first time, their total lack of care about their nudity. Now, a quick averting of his eyes was normal, just part of the procedure. He watched each pair touch their foreheads together, watched Joonmyun sag.

“Only two?” He said.

Minseok’s guts dropped into his feet.

“We are few and have lost many,” Yixing said - for Minseok’s benefit, he knew. There was no need for him to speak aloud to Joonmyun.

“But some still agree to serve. Two nestmates, Chanyeol and Jongdae. Strong males.”

Joonmyun grasped Yixing’s arm, and they leaned toward one another.

“Choosing day after tomorrow,” Seungwan said over her shoulder as she and her partner walked away.

“What do you need, sir?” Minseok asked.

“Nothing,” Joonmyun said. “I know you’re off-duty until morning. Barring emergencies, you know the drill. Normal procedures until they’re ready to choose.”

Minseok nodded and turned to go.

“They are here, Scout Minseok,” Yixing called after him. “They observe.”

That was another kindness. For an airling, Yixing was positively chatty.

Minseok turned and bowed his thanks, despite the anxiety whipping through his chest.

He would never forget the first airling he saw, back in basic, with the broad features of a caracara and that profound stillness that so many humans found spooky. In the barely controlled chaos of the military base, preparing for the uncontrolled chaos of the war, Minseok had been shaken to his bones by that stillness. He had been an excellent student as a child, if without direction, knowing that because of the war his lifespan was likely to end before he had begun anything, so he had surprised even himself with the focus he was capable of, once he found a goal: air scouts.

The training was famous for washing out 98% of trainees: if it wasn’t the survival training, it was the data analysis, and if it wasn’t the data analysis, it was the isolation, weeks spent alone to become accustomed to a scout’s life. By the time they learned about the mind-bonds and how many partnered pairs ended up something akin to married regardless of sex distribution and the fact that the two species couldn’t breed, there had been 6 members of his class left. After that lecture, there were only 2.

Himself, Baekhyun. Minseok knew that he probably would’ve made it through training even without Baek - he had discovered a true talent for persistence in himself - but a poorer person for it. Baekhyun had been competition, true. Over time, pushing one another to their limits had made clear that Baek was a slightly better data analyst, while Minseok had the sliver of edge in wilderness and infiltration skills. But more than that, Baekhyun had been a partner, confidant, occasional lover through the physical and emotional rigors of training, a light against the great darkness of war that lay ahead of them. They had grown into men together. For years, they had held one another up. And now they were on their third choosing season. Their final chance.

“Only two?” Baekhyun groaned, covering his face with his hands outside their quarters. “Fuck. I’ll never make it now. We’ll both be kicked down to infantry and get our nuts blown off.”

Minseok felt about as gloomy, but because he was slightly older, he considered it a duty to sit, put his arm around Baekhyun’s waist, and say,

“No way. We’re trained, experienced scouts. They wouldn’t waste us as artillery fodder.”

Baekhyun looked at him bleakly.

“That’s barely an improvement. Crawling through the mud alone until we slide over a landmine. Same outcome. Nuts: boom.”

A knot of the latest batch of recruits sped past, looking giddy, probably from having heard the news of the choosing. They were all so young. They were all so tall. Maybe scouts training had loosened up in the past year: 10 new trainees had come up the mountain at the end of summer, to go with the 5 unchosen from last year. And Baekhyun. And Minseok.

For 2 partners.

“I know,” Minseok said.

They made a brave face of it at mess, answering as many of the recruits’ questions about choosing as were answerable.

“No, always in avian form,” Minseok said at one point. “I don’t know why.”

“Who knows?” Baekhyun answered to the question of how airlings chose. “The only humans who might know are mind-bonded, and there’s no way they’ll tell.”

The conversation devolved from there into speculation and torrid rumor. Once it got to the crude jokes about mind-bonding, Minseok left, followed closely by Baekhyun.

“Were we that stupid?” Baek asked, kicking a stone into the darkness.

“Probably,” Minseok said. “Though it’s hard to remember.”

“Three years we’ve been up here,” Baek said. “Taking messages, drawing maps. Every time I think I might die of boredom, that it can’t possibly be worth it, one of them flies in, and it just -“

He sighed.

“Breaks your heart?” Minseok said.

“Yeah.”

They’d had close moments, both of them: Minseok their first year and Baekhyun the year before. Minseok still dreamed about the vivid orange eyes of the red-shouldered hawk standing in front of him, his breath high in his chest, and a feeling like he wanted to reach for something.

But that airling had turned away from him. Had partnered with someone else. Had died in an ambush the following spring.

They sat on the front stoop of the tiny cabin that served as their quarters until the sky grew dark. Even in the fall, the camp lost sunlight in mid-afternoon, thanks to trees and the shallow bowl camp sat in, right on the very edge of the frontier. Past them lay mountains impassable to anyone but airlings in one direction and the long, ragged descent through more mountains and thick forest, down to the wreck of a valley that had served as a hardly-moving front line for Minseok’s entire lifetime.

He barely knew what bright sunshine felt like anymore, could hardly imagine air not scented by pines. His last letter from his family had described driving to the beach, how hot it had been, eating a packaged lunch from a roadside store.

He couldn’t even picture it. The scouts’ base was an entirely different world. The generators only ran for 4 hours a day, aside from the one that powered the communication lines. The bathhouse was heated with wood, and everyone was expected to contribute to the woodpile when they had a moment free, just as they were expected to contribute to the camp’s larder, either by tending the garden or hunting (or, in Joonmyun’s case, brewing a number of really awful medicinal wines made more terrible by the fact that they actually worked).

Cities, sidewalks, crowds, markets filled with food – it seemed like a dream that they were charged to protect from up here in the sky.

“You know what I miss? Getting drunk,” Baekhyun said.

Minseok laughed.

“I set my sights higher,” he said. “I miss central heating.”

“God, I don’t even remember what a winter without chilblains is like,” Baek groused, holding out a hand to Minseok to pull him up and head inside.

It had been a long time since they had played together. They slept in the same bed plenty often, for comfort and for warmth, but enough time had passed that Minseok flinched with surprise when Baekhyun’s hand drifted downward and his mouth touched Minseok’s neck.

“Let me, hyung,” Baek whispered. “It’ll make us both feel better.”

His hand in Baekhyun's hair while Baek’s head bobbed up and down, Minseok figured that “better” might be a stretch. But at least they’d be able to sleep, sweaty and spent, between Baek’s mouth and his hand, the familiar dance of their bodies together.

Baekhyun didn’t look well-rested in the morning, even in his sleep. He had shadows under his eyes, and the natural downturn of his mouth was pronounced. Minseok combed the hair off Baek’s forehead. No matter what happened, there was almost zero likelihood of their being quartered together ever again. What would he do, without seeing Baekhyun’s face every day?

Baekhyun woke, the quiet, sudden waking of the soldier he was. He looked up into Minseok’s face, rolled in to cling to him briefly, and sighed. Minseok felt that warm huff of breath against his throat. Allowed himself the comfort of one more kiss. For luck.

“Just another day, right Min?”

“Yes.”

It wasn’t, of course. Although there were the usual tasks - morning muster, checking the overnight messages, updating maps and reports - the camp was tense with the upcoming choice. The recruits could barely focus. Minseok knew himself to not be any better.

At lunch he joined Kibum, who’d been smiling at his rice for several minutes straight.

“Did you have news?”

Kibum nodded happily.

“Seungwan passed the message along last night. Two hatchlings! I knew something good had happened, I could feel BoA’s joy a couple months ago, even this far away. I just.”

He shook his head.

“I wish I could see her. See them. Meet her mate.”

Minseok grasped Kibum’s arm. He never could decide which sounded harder: the pairs who devoted themselves to each other and had to make their own world or the ones who separated to live their different human and airling lives.

“I’m happy for her,” Minseok said.

“Oh, me too,” Kibum said.

A busy day, masquerading as normal. Minseok and Baekhyun lingered in the bathhouse that evening, pretending that a scrub and a soak would help them sleep. But each of them tossed so much that Minseok got up in the middle of the night and went to his own bed. This was better only in that they stopped kicking one another. Otherwise, it was merely cold and lonely. Once the sky lightened, they both stopped staring at the ceiling in the dark and rose to clean their quarters and brood over uneaten breakfasts.

Joonmyun met them outside the door of the mess hall.

“It’s time,” he said.

The whole camp gathered. There were perches all over, but the one in the center was the largest. The potential scouts sat on the ground in a ring around it, the other humans standing behind them, the airlings all in avian form, on a partner’s wrist, on a roof, or swooping restlessly around. After a few minutes, two forms glided in from the trees and alighted on the perch.

Minseok’s breath caught in his throat, and he heard Baekhyun gasp beside him. A harpy eagle and a gyrfalcon: the one huge and fierce-looking, the other all sleek focus.

They were both so beautiful.

The airlings turned on the perch, surveying the scouts. Minseok held himself straight and met their eyes when they looked at him. The gyrfalcon flew several circles over their heads; a little later, it was the harpy eagle’s turn. After what must’ve been almost an hour of looking, they each flew to the ground.

In avian form, this was awkward for them. They each hopped and fluttered between scouts. One potential scout laughed; the harpy eagle hissed, and that scout was pulled away to wait another year. They hopped, stared. Made their rejections known with a hiss or a turned back. And still Minseok sat. Baekhyun was still beside him.

It was down to 5 potential scouts when the gyrfalcon returned to the perch and chewed on one foot. The harpy eagle lifted off, made several turns around the camp, and landed in front of Minseok.

He froze. The harpy eagle cocked its head, and he stared into its dark eyes. Its - his - legs were as thick as Minseok’s wrist. The harpy eagle was at eye level as Minseok sat on the ground.

He could feel the strangest pressure in his head, not quite a headache, almost as if he was straining to hear something far away. The eagle rumbled in its throat.

There was a flash, a rustle, and the harpy eagle was knocked over as the gyrfalcon plowed into it. The eagle, on its back, opened its beak as if shocked.

The gyrfalcon stood in front of Minseok and screamed, wings wide and high in a clear dominance display. The harpy eagle stood up. The gyrfalcon screamed again, and the eagle lowered its head.

The gyrfalcon turned and settled. Minseok stared at it. Was this - it? He didn’t know what to feel, had he just been chosen?

The gyrfalcon stepped forward and nipped at his jacket cuff with its beak, shook itself, and sat down. Minseok tried to determine what was going on and came up empty. The future yawned in front of him, huge and immediate.

The harpy eagle stepped forward, dejection in every feather, and laid its head on Baekhyun’s shoulder.

“Oh, wow,” Baekhyun said, laughing wetly and stroking the eagle’s back. “Hi.”

The camp bustled around them, but Minseok noticed none of it. He was vaguely aware of Baekhyun next to him, his breathless laugh and the harpy eagle’s soft whistle. But most of Minseok’s mind was taken up with sheer disbelief at the airling in front of him.

The gyrfalcon had greyish-brown feathers on his back with cream tips, a cream breast mottled with grey. While Minseok stared, the gyrfalcon blinked, white membranes flicking briefly over those black eyes, ringed in blue-grey and surrounded by darker feathers that pooled under his brow ridges and swept back to meet on his nape.

The gyrfalcon shook his head, stood, and stretched out to tug at the glove in Minseok’s belt.

Minseok laughed aloud. The gyrfalcon startled, head feathers rising, then cocked his head and peeped once.

Minseok could remember so clearly being given his glove at the end of training. It was the beginning of a long list of kit, most of which was designed to assist one’s partner in avian form or provide first aid. But the glove was the symbol of air scouts, more even than the red and white patch with a wing on it on his shoulder. Minseok remembered the gravity of tucking the glove into his belt for the first time, confident and excited for the future. Every day since then he had worn it, but he couldn’t remember when he had given up on ever using it.

And now he would. He drew the thick, soft leather over his hand, and the gyrfalcon hopped into his wrist, a slight weight. A weight he could easily carry all day. The gyrfalcon gripped his wrist, just shy of strong enough to hurt.

“Hello,” he said. “I’m Minseok.”

The gyrfalcon bobbed his head. This being who had chosen to be his partner until one or both of them died. This fierce, beautiful creature. It felt unreal.

Minseok raised his hand.

“May I?”

The gyrfalcon ducked his head. Minseok stroked the cool, soft feathers gently, until the gyrfalcon’s eyes went half-lidded and he crooned softly.

Minseok had to close his own eyes against the rush of feeling that threatened to overwhelm him. Everything would be different now. He had spent years preparing and waiting. Now he would begin.

Baekhyun laughed; the gyrfalcon shook himself. Minseok looked over, and Baek had his glove in his hand, laughing while he stared at the harpy eagle’s enormous feet.

“It’s not going to work!” he said, grinning.

The harpy eagle bobbed and gave a sad-sounding whistle, crest feathers standing up in distress. The expression on Baek’s face held a tenderness Minseok had never seen before when he reached out to stroke the eagle’s head.

“It’s all right,” Baekhyun said. “We’ll work it out.”

He turned to Minseok with swimming eyes.

“His name is Chanyeol.”

“You must be Jongdae,” Minseok murmured.

Jongdae arched his head back, spread his wings, and cried out. Minseok grinned at it, stroked those impossibly soft breast feathers.

Minseok wasn’t surprised that Baek would mind-bond instantly with his partner. He drew people to him, which was a strange attribute in a scout and seemed all the stronger for that. And Chanyeol had a powerful mind, if that weird pressure Minseok had felt had been him, testing.

Given those two facts, surely it would be petty and unrealistic for Minseok to feel unhappy that the only voice in his head remained his own.

“Let me show you to your new quarters,” Seungwan said, warmth in her voice.

Minseok remembered her arrival the year prior, an even rarer woman in the rare air scouts, and the immediacy with which Joohyun had landed in front of her. How much jealousy he had fought down in himself. But her smile was bright.

“Congratulations, lieutenant,” she said.

Minseok nodded; his throat was too full for speech as they walked to the edge of camp and the austringers’ quarters. No more Baek, or anyone else. He would only bunk with Jongdae from now on. He clenched his fist, and Jongdae shifted on his arm.

The austringers’ quarters lay under the edge of the trees. Half of them stood empty, even if their number seemed sparse because of the distance between them. They were dim, with small windows, two bunks, and a perch. Jongdae flew to this, looking around. Minseok’s belongings had been packed for him by an unchosen scout and delivered: his job for the past 2 years, and never again.

He was pulling absently at the straps of one rucksack when there was a knock at the door. Jongdae hissed.

Yixing stood outside, with Baekhyun and a tall, dark-eyed man with steel grey hair.

“We brought Jongdae’s belongings,” Yixing said, handing over two large knapsacks.

He cocked his head at the perch, yellow eyes narrowing.

“Jongdae, why have you not changed?”

Minseok looked down at the bags and felt like a bit of an idiot that it had never occurred to him that his partner would have their own belongings.

“We become a crowd, flying down the mountain, eight feet to a bag,” a deep, unfamiliar voice said.

Minseok looked up, and of course that was Chanyeol, handsome with his grin, standing close enough to Baekhyun that their shoulders touched.

“I have the excuse of requiring large clothes. Jongdae is simply a collector.”

Jongdae gave a brief shriek from his perch. The expressions crossing Chanyeol’s face told Minseok that they were speaking to one another across the bond of nest-mates.

“Why does he remain winged?” Yixing demanded.

Chanyeol looked down and blinked.

“Jongdae is stubborn. He will do as he pleases, until he gets his way.”

His way? In what?

Minseok turned. Jongdae was shifting from foot to foot on the perch, beak opening and closing. Something was wrong, obviously. Or Jongdae would’ve changed. Would’ve spoken to him. Would have – if things were ideal, as they evidently were with Baekhyun and Chanyeol – already initiated the mind-bond.

What if it was a mistake? Could Jongdae – change his mind?

“What do I do?”

Yixing blinked rapidly. Those milky membranes crossing his eyes was the only evidence of surprise at Minseok’s question.

“You bear no fault,” Chanyeol said. “My nest-brother is angry that others of us are speaking to his scout.”

Jongdae screamed and flew at Chanyeol, who raised one arm, apparently unconcerned. Jongdae banked off that arm and circled the room, then shocked Minseok out of his skin by landing on his (thankfully padded) shoulder.

Yixing’s sunlight eyes blazed.

“Scout Minseok is diligent and skilled,” Yixing said. “You do your chosen dishonor.”

Jongdae made a low, clicking rumble.

“You’re being rude,” Chanyeol added.

Jongdae shrieked.

Baekhyun tried to reach out one hand toward Minseok, which made Jongdae flap his wings and scream again. Minseok had to content himself with a sympathetic glance.

“We’ll go,” Baekhyun said. “Give you guys some space.”

Minseok's hopes that Jongdae would change and introduce himself when they were alone did not come to fruition. Jongdae flew several circles around the room, alighted on the perch, and made a series of sharp, echoing complaints.

Eventually, Minseok gave up waiting and tidied their room. If Jongdae wouldn’t express a preference, Minseok would take the bed that could be moved so that he could see out the window while lying down. He set Jongdae’s bags on the other bed. Jongdae watched him the whole time, moving only as much as necessary to always keep Minseok in his line of sight.

“Well,” Minseok said when he could think of nothing else to do.

He sat on his bed, back against the wall, to watch Jongdae.

Who decided instead that he would prefer to glide across the short distance to Minseok’s wrist. Minseok’s heart lurched to the side. He decided to take what he could get.

They sat like that for a long time, Minseok stroking his feathers until Jongdae drowsed, eyes covered and one foot curled. That was something, Minseok supposed, that Jongdae would trust him enough to sleep on his wrist.

It _was_ something. Something different from Baekhyun’s disbelieving laugh, or the way Seungwan and Joohyun had immediately touched their foreheads together, holding hands. He wouldn’t be bitter about it.

He wouldn’t.

The bell rang for mess. Minseok asked Jongdae whether he would change. Jongdae regarded him with a glance that Minseok was certain was flat refusal, and flew out into the woods. He tried to ignore the universal surprise at his showing up at the mess hall alone and sat next to Baekhyun, on the other side, away from Chanyeol.

Baekhyun did him the kindness of quizzing Joonmyun about next steps.

“You’ll have a couple of weeks for your bond to solidify before we even think of sending you out,” Joonmyun said. “That’s the important thing right now.”

Minseok ignored Joonmyun’s eyes cutting toward him, then away.

“And anyway, it would take a major action for us to put you in the field before a month’s out.”

A month. Surely Jongdae would change by then. Surely.

Minseok poked glumly at his stew, eating only because he knew he must.

Just when he was thinking that he had been there long enough for appearances, he heard a cry – Jongdae's cry – and Jongdae swooped in to land next to him on the table. His beak and talons were crusted with the remains of his dinner.

“Jongdae, why do you do this? You insisted that you must have him, this is cruelty,” Chanyeol said.

Jongdae hissed.

Minseok went to fetch a shallow dish of water for Jongdae to splash in and clean off. He couldn’t imagine what Chanyeol meant, “insisted you must have him,” but he clung to it, that there was a reason for all this confusion. That Jongdae wasn’t going to lift from his wrist and land on someone else’s. Or, just as bad, simply fly back home.

When he was done sending water all over the floor, then shaking it all over Minseok’s shins, Jongdae hopped up onto the padded forearm of Minseok’s jacket with a firm grip and a lunge toward anyone who tried to get close.

“I will take your tray and clean this mess, Scout Minseok, so you can tend to this _bird_ ,” Yixing said.

The sound Jongdae made was very rude, and no wonder, given that Yixing had used just about the worst insult airlings had for one another.

Nothing changed, though. Jongdae least of all. Not that night, nor the next day. The two of them spent much of the day in the forest, Jongdae flying tight loops around trees and always returning, but even being away from camp couldn’t induce him to shift. They returned in the late afternoon with 4 nice rabbits. Minseok sat outside the mess hall to dress them, tossing choice bits to Jongdae. Making note of the eagerness with which Jongdae went for the livers and hearts. Succeeding very poorly at beating back the disappointment that ate at him.

“Thanks for livening up dinner,” Baekhyun said.

Jongdae hopped in a circle and hissed at Baek, who frowned at him.

“There’s not enough hand-washing in the world to make up for that job, see you in the bath house later?” Baekhyun added.

Jongdae spread his wings wide and screamed.

“You are ridiculous,” Chanyeol said.

And when Minseok tried to go to the bathhouse, Jongdae gripped his forearm too tightly, pulled at Minseok’s sleeve with his beak, making a low peeping sound.

“You don’t want me to go?”

Jongdae shook himself, rubbed his face against Minseok’s shoulder. Minseok sighed.

“All right.”

He was damned if he knew what was going on. But he tried to make the best of it, spending the evening instead running his hands over Jongdae’s feathers. Finding a couple on the top of Jongdae’s head that needed preening and rubbing on them until the waxy coating came free. Jongdae crooned and leaned into his chest. And for a little while, Minseok felt that thrill again, that he had been given a place to belong.

Jongdae cried out when the camp alarm woke them well before dawn.

“It’s all right,” Minseok said, pulling clothes on.

He looked at Jongdae shifting from foot to foot on the perch.

“Will you come with me?”

Jongdae bobbed his head and climbed into Minseok’s wrist.

“I don’t understand this at all,” Joonmyun muttered when all the partnered scouts were gathered in the surveillance cabin.

He had printouts and scraps of paper in one hand and was staring at the huge topological map that took up the entire meeting table. Minseok could hear the chatter of transcription machines in the background, messages still coming in.

“This is,” he said.

He handed the stack of papers to Minseok.

The messages in fact made no sense. Minseok held his hand out to Baekhyun, who took half of them. Then Minseok spread his remaining papers on the map table.

“How is this possible?” Baekhyun asked.

“It’s not,” Joonmyun said. “Not for half the enemy forces to disappear overnight.”

All of the scouts passed the messages around while Joonmyun pulled troop markers off the map.

“They have no airlings?” Chanyeol asked.

“None that we know of. Unless there’s a second territory to the south.”

The airlings in the room frowned at one another.

“No,” Yixing said eventually. “We are the people of the north, the people of the air.”

He and Joonmyun stared at each other, obviously speaking over their bond.

“Yes,” Joonmyun said. “We need to know that. Take whoever can best assist, and come back as quick as you can.”

Yixing stepped forward long enough for them to touch foreheads; then he pointed to two other airlings – an osprey and a broad-winged hawk – who said goodbye to their partners, and they flew off into the pre-dawn darkness, Minseok guessed toward their homeland.

“We need more eyes,” Joonmyun said. “Baekhyun, Minseok, I know it’s too soon, but we need all our eyes in the sky.”

“Our bond is settled,” Chanyeol said.

“It’s no problem,” Baekhyun said.

Minseok groaned inwardly. It was too soon, how could they possibly?

Jongdae coughed up a casting and spat it onto the map.

Chanyeol put one hand over his face.

“Scout Minseok,” he said. “That is a demonstration of my nest-brother’s disdain for danger. Also of his terrible manners.”

One of the staff members discreetly took the casting away in a tissue.

“We’ll go, then?” he asked Jongdae, who bobbed his head.

“All right,” Joonmyun said.

Division of labor was made easier by each airling’s species in their winged form: Chanyeol would be no good in cold weather but excellent in the thick forests that ringed the valley floor. Joohyun, a merlin, was small and quick and suited for the less-forested grasslands of the valley itself, closer to the front lines. What used to be the front lines. Joonmyun made assignments, and pairs slipped away to pack and prepare, until only Minseok and Jongdae were left.

Minseok knew this map intimately. He had seen their assignment from miles away.

“We’ll be fine, Major,” he said.

Joonmyun’s faced creased with worry.

“It’s so far, Min, and with your bond unsettled.”

Jongdae hopped onto Minseok’s arm and hissed.

“He’s built for the cold,” Minseok said. “We’re both accustomed to heights. I can do it. We can do it. You need to know the big picture. Give us a jeep and someone to drive us as far up the mountain as it can get and we’ll get you those eyes as soon as we can.”

After a pause, Joonmyun nodded.

“All right, Lieutenant. I’ll trust you. The jeep’ll be ready at dawn.”

“Yes sir.”

“And Minseok,” Joonmyun called out when he was at the door.

Minseok turned.

“Come back. Don’t tell me you’ll do your best. Just – come back.”

“Sir,” Minseok said, and saluted.

There was a lot to pack, for a trip out into the wilderness for an indeterminate length of time. The minimum number of clothes – but he _must_ have his cold-weather gear. No skimping on socks. The things that would sound like luxuries in camp but be necessary after months in the woods: soap, a flask of whiskey, a packet each of salt and coffee, and his favorite book. The falconry kit. The first-aid supplies and freeze-dried food. Climbing gear. The sewing kit, maps, and compass. The communications array and codebook. His rifle and side-arm plus ammunition, his hunting knife, a small axe, a collapsible bow and its assorted sundries. A blanket, a tarp, a sleeping bag, a collapsible cookpot, and a canteen.

Two large bags, to go with Jongdae’s two large bags. Minseok sighed.

Well, he’d figure it out when the jeep dropped them off.

Minseok dragged the bags outside; Jongdae circled him restlessly, a pale spot against the grey of the sky. One of the unchosen recruits stood by to drive them up the mountain and helped him pile the bags in the back and secure them. A smaller bag had been tucked into one corner, stuffed full by someone in the mess hall and very welcome.

Joonmyun came out to send them off, along with Baekhyun and Chanyeol. Jongdae tried to fly at Baekhyun, and Chanyeol snatched him out of the air.

“I don’t care about your notions, nest-brother,” he said. “You _will_ allow them their goodbye.”

Minseok staggered that Chanyeol had said that out loud.

Baekhyun hugged him close. Minseok allowed himself to sag briefly in Baekhyun’s hold.

“Don’t worry about him. Chanyeol showed me, it really is fine, Min. Just keep yourself safe, okay? Come back here and see me again,” Baekhyun said.

“I will if you will.”

“Deal,” Baek whispered, and placed a soft, hidden kiss under Minseok’s ear.

Minseok took refuge in very straight posture and a parade-worthy facial expression. That Jongdae and Chanyeol were by this time standing quiet, with their heads touching – one huge, one so small – did not help Minseok’s attempt at stoicism.

“Stay safe and see far, Scout Minseok,” Chanyeol said.

“Take care of each other,” Minseok said.

Jongdae came to his wrist. As the jeep pulled away, they both turned back and watched Baekhyun and Chanyeol until the two could no longer be seen for the trees.

It was a rough, uncomfortable ride. Minseok suspected that Jongdae had never ridden in a wheeled vehicle before; he obviously disliked it, and Minseok spent his morning trying to soothe his partner and convince him to conserve his energy and stay on his wrist. That at least made the time pass without brooding.

Three hours’ slow driving up the mountain would cut probably 2 days off their climb, and Minseok was grateful for it, though he was equally grateful to step out onto the ground with his own two feet and the anticipation of some quiet.

“How are you going to do this?” the recruit asked, looking skeptically at Jongdae and gesturing toward the 4 bags.

“I’ll travois them, it’s fine,” Minseok said.

It would be a bitch of a slog and slow him down like crazy, but he would make it work. If he ever changed, Jongdae would need what he’d packed.

The recruit nodded, still obviously dubious. But he saluted, and Minseok waved him off back down the mountain. Jongdae jumped into the air, presumably to stretch. Minseok watched for a few more minutes, though the jeep was past sight, if not yet past hearing.

Here he was. This was what he’d trained for. No more playing. He took a deep breath and turned to find a couple of saplings to cut for travois poles.

A naked man stood behind him.

Minseok jumped; by habit, his hand went to his sidearm, and his eyes scanned the sky for Jongdae.

Except that this was Jongdae.

Logically, it couldn’t be anyone else. But also, Minseok knew that it was Jongdae: black-eyed and dark-haired with pale skin. Sprinkles of beauty marks across his chest that mimicked the mottle of his breast feathers. Barely taller than Minseok himself, but broader through the chest and shoulders from flight, and without any visible body hair. A square chin and high, sculpted cheekbones, strong eyebrows. Narrow lips that tipped upward at the corners, giving him a look of mischief.

In this form, too, he was beautiful.

“Jongdae,” Minseok said, his voice gravelly.

“Yes.”

Jongdae gestured; Minseok realized that he was standing in front of the bags and stepped aside. He tried not to stare while Jongdae pulled clothing out of one pack and put it on: dark grey leather leggings, a black quilted tunic, and a pair of black lace-up boots so soft that they’d been rolled up into cylinders in the bag.

“Will those stand up to the terrain?” Minseok blurted while Jongdae scowled his way through lacing them from ankle to knee.

Jongdae stopped and looked up at him, as sharp as he did in avian form, but with one eyebrow quirked.

“They are wyvern hide,” he said in an unexpectedly deep voice. “They have been in my family for five nests.”

Which was, as far as Minseok remembered of airling timekeeping, approximately 150 years. They looked brand-new. Minseok figured they’d be all right. Being made of the hide of a mythical beast and all.

“For once, I had the advantage,” Jongdae said as he stood. “Chanyeol’s feet are too big for them.”

Minseok found himself rooted in place, with hundreds of questions fighting to be asked at once. He was here. Speaking. Jongdae.

“We should walk while there is sunlight,” Jongdae said.

Right.

They each hauled a pack onto their front and back and climbed. Logically, it made sense to conserve his breath, but Minseok still longed to ask – what? To ask everything. Mostly variations on “why.”

He snuck glances at Jongdae while they climbed, how he studied their surroundings. How he grimaced when the straps of the packs bothered his shoulders. How he pushed his hair out of his face with an annoyed-looking shove. How often he stared at Minseok, which always made Minseok look away.

They crossed a stream after several hours, nearly 3 p.m. They had less than 2 hours of daylight left, but Jongdae stopped and dropped his packs.

“I must eat,” he said.

Minseok could’ve kicked himself for forgetting the basic fact of the fast airling metabolism.

“Sorry.”

Jongdae looked at him and cocked his head to one side, just as he did when he was winged. Minseok felt a bit like a rabbit about to find its end.

“Oh, I have this,” Minseok said, reaching for the bag from the mess hall that had been waiting for them in the back of the jeep.

Jongdae didn’t appear to enjoy the sandwich much, though he ate the whole thing, and the pear that came with it. He dug in one pack and pulled out a leather canteen that he filled at the stream, while Minseok filled his tin one. They drank side by side. Minseok took off his hat and dunked his head. The water was freezing and wonderful.

“Are you – a hatchling? Or in moult?” Jongdae asked after Minseok had sat back and wiped his eyes.

Minseok scowled at him, then saw that Jongdae was staring at his relative lack of hair and had to smile. Jongdae blinked.

“Neither,” Minseok said. “My people don’t moult, anyway. My hair’s just shaved. It’ll grow now that we’re out in the field. I’ll be glad of the extra warmth soon enough.”

Jongdae nodded.

“I am a hatchling, by my people’s reckoning,” he said. “Though by your people’s I am an adult.”

Of all the questions Minseok had thought to ask, this hadn’t been one of them.

“How old are you?”

Jongdae blinked again. Minseok had always thought it strange that their non-avian forms looked so human other than that sideways blinking reflex, a milky membrane sliding across from the inner corner of the eye.

“What is your word for the period from one sun-mark to the next?”

“Year,” Minseok guessed.

“I have twenty-five years.”

“Two years fewer than me,” Minseok said. “Is that why you volunteered? Because this is where you’d be treated like an adult?”

“In part,” Jongdae said with a shrug. “Our nest is close to BoA’s. Chanyeol and I were always eager for stories of her service.”

BoA, Kibum’s beautiful peregrine falcon partner. There was no one braver. She was a legend among the air scouts, and Kibum as well. Together they had uncovered intelligence that foiled an attack on the port city that was their country’s main source of food imports during the war.

Of course, Minseok also remembered Kibum’s desolation when she had decided to fly home and take a mate.

“I knew her when I first joined the scouts,” Minseok said.

“She is brave and beautiful,” Jongdae said.

Minseok nodded.

“This service.”

Jongdae spoke slowly, as if the words didn’t want to come out.

“To fly, as I was hatched to do, and have it serve a purpose. To be allowed to fly as I please. That flight might be my sole obligation. This became my dream.”

Minseok nodded at his knees. His chest felt tight with longing. He would never fly. But his presence and training would mean that this lovely creature would. It was his job, now, to give Jongdae the space and a reason to fly.

When he looked up, Jongdae’s gaze on him was thoughtful. They stared at one another for long enough that it made Minseok nervous.

“Was that Chanyeol’s reason too?”

Jongdae scowled.

“Chanyeol has romantic ideas about the mind-bond,” he spat, then stood and re-shouldered his packs.

By dint of merely walking at a comfortable pace, Minseok eventually convinced Jongdae that they didn’t need to sprint up the mountain for the remaining hours of light. He kept the packet of walnuts from the food bag in his hand, which also helped keep Jongdae by his side. Jongdae stewed and grumbled to himself until he was too tired for it, and then they walked silently together, other than the crunch of walnuts between teeth.

Minseok didn’t know why that statement about his nest-brother made Jongdae so angry, and he wasn’t about to ask until they knew each other better. But it made him happy for Baekhyun, who also had romantic ideas about the mind-bond. No wonder their bond had settled so quickly. Minseok had no doubt they’d make a powerful, devoted pair.

He also had no doubt that he needed to keep his own (somewhat romantic) ideas about mind-bonding to himself.

As the woods grew darker around them, Minseok had to rely on Jongdae’s eyesight to guide them. Once, he stumbled, and Jongdae’s hand grasped his arm to steady him in a grip almost as strong as his talons had been. After the second time Minseok tripped over a root he couldn’t see, Jongdae held onto his arm. Minseok had seen how he was lean and muscled; now he felt how Jongdae threw off body heat.

“There is light ahead,” Jongdae said. “Not much further. And I hear a stream nearby.”

It was just another few minutes of stumbling through the dark before they hit the clearing Jongdae had seen. By that point, Minseok could hear the stream as well, off to the left.

“Can we stay here?” Jongdae asked. “I would like to see the sky.”

The last part sounded wistful, and Minseok felt his heart clench for the hundredth time, the past few days.

“Of course.”

Setting up camp was still ingrained in Minseok’s muscles: fire first, in a shallow rock-lined pit, fetching water. The food bag had some of Jongdae’s rabbits in it, wrapped in waxed paper.

Raw, in case Jongdae had still refused to change. Minseok smiled to himself. Had that been the case, they wouldn’t have made half the progress they had today, with him dragging all their gear behind him. If they could keep up this pace, they’d be at their destination in 3 days.

“We’ll grow tired of rabbit long before we have the chance to eat anything else,” Jongdae said on the other side of the fire.

He drew a long, black-bladed knife out of one pack and walked away, came back a couple of minutes later with several pine boughs, which he tossed on top of the fire. He took the packet of rabbit meat from Minseok’s hands and arranged the pieces on top of the boughs. Minseok looked at him.

“It makes a pleasant flavor,” Jongdae said.

Well enough. Minseok took the waxed paper to the stream and washed it carefully. Something semi-waterproof would surely be useful at some point. As he stepped back into the clearing, Jongdae was still bent over his packs, staring down at something in his hand.

A pair of jesses, pale brown leather embroidered with green.

Only airlings with the deepest, most settled mind-bonds, who had pledged to live in the human world, would consent to wear jesses. They wore their own, put them on themselves. BoA never wore them. Yixing did. Joohyun did, and Seungwan had a matching set of her own, wrapped carefully around her ankles under her boots.

Surely it was the firelight that made Jongdae’s ears look flushed. He put the jesses away.

“It was not my intention to bring everything out into the field,” he said, sounding annoyed again.

Minseok chose not to point out that this was the natural result of being too stubborn to speak until after they’d left camp.

They were silent for a while after that. Minseok watched the rabbit, and Jongdae switched belongings around in his bags while Minseok tried hard not to stare too much. It felt like prying. They would live together, he had time to find out.

The rabbit was delicious. The pine boughs lent the meat a sharp flavor like rosemary. When they had cooled, Jongdae plucked the needles and sucked the grease off. Minseok tried it but wrinkled his nose: too much like a throat lozenge. His facial expression made Jongdae briefly grin: a wide, bright smile that animated his whole face and made him even more beautiful.

It gave Minseok hope that their current prickly discomfort might not last forever.

“Do your people ever choose to bond with humans you don’t actually – like?” he asked, and regretted it immediately.

What a question.

But Jongdae gave him that sharp, predatory stare again, head tilted to one side.

“No,” he said.

So that was something.

Minseok was afraid he’d lie awake under the stars brooding, but the day’s hard walk didn’t allow it. The night was warm enough that he could use his rolled-up blanket for a pillow on the springy ground. They woke as soon as the sky was light and made a cold breakfast of the remaining rabbit. Minseok had a quick wash in the freezing stream, in case it was his last chance for a while. He supposed it was unsurprising that he looked up from drying off to see Jongdae staring at him.

To be gazed at like prey like this all the time would take some getting used to.

They made good time, eating the last damp, squashed sandwiches from the food bag midday while they walked, and the weather was kind to them. They found another likely camping spot not long before dusk. Jongdae shifted and flew off. Minseok spent the intervening hour tending the fire and sternly lecturing himself about any lack of necessity to have a heart attack. He felt sick with relief by the time Jongdae dropped a yearling badger at his feet.

Minseok watched him step out of the sky for the first time, the way his wings and legs reached out, and then forward, his body lengthening and head tipped back, feathers rippling into not-there-ness. Jongdae’s black eyes flashed above his blood-smeared face, his pale skin looking as if it shone in the low-slanting light, and Minseok forgot that air was even a thing that existed.

Jongdae tilted his head. Minseok wondered how strange it would look if he slapped himself.

“I don’t know what to do with that,” Minseok said.

He’d hunted plenty, of course, and part of his wilderness training had included 2 months in late winter, purposely meant to teach him what it meant to starve and what was actually edible versus not. Anything cute was always a bit tricky at first, when one wasn’t in a state of having lived off one meal every other day for over a month with one’s ribs showing. But somehow, badger had never made it on the menu.

Jongdae nodded.

“Same as rabbits. But this close to its sleep, it has more fat. Good fuel. Not very tasty.”

“I’ll dress it, then, if you’d like to clean up.”

Jongdae gave him that sharp, predatory stare again, eyebrows arched like wings. Then he turned on his heel, swept up his waterskin, and stalked off to the stream.

He came back from his wash looking less irritated, with a thin, flat rock in one hand that he set to one edge of the fire. He looked over Minseok’s butchering job with what Minseok thought (hoped) was approval.

“You were careful with the skin.”

“Habit,” Minseok said.

He also looked at the liver and heart, laid carefully to one side on top of leaves.

“Um,” Minseok said. “I noticed that you liked those. From the rabbits.”

Swifter than Minseok could see, Jongdae’s face was mere millimeters from his. A shaft of low sunlight crossed over them as a breeze sent the trees dancing, and Minseok saw that Jongdae’s eyes weren’t black after all, but the very darkest brown. He felt that strange not-headache again, as if trying hard to hear something in the distance. He _longed_.

The fire popped. Jongdae blinked.

He sat back several centimeters and looked Minseok up and down, only his eyes moving.

“Thank you,” he said, and moved to the other side of the fire.

They cooked the badger over pine boughs again, though Jongdae sliced the liver and heart into impossibly thin strips, eating some raw and cooking the rest of them on the flat rock. It was greasy, and Minseok would’ve rated it barely edible if it hadn’t been for the past 2 days’ walk and the knowledge that every gram he could add to his weight now would help him out later.

The nearly transparent slices of liver were the best part, but Minseok would consent to eat only a few of them, seeing the pleasure Jongdae had in them. Afterward, Jongdae scraped the badger skin and set it raw side down at the edge of the trees. Then he lay back with the grease-covered pine needles sprouting from his mouth like whiskers, head pillowed on one arm, and looked up at the sky.

Questions crowded Minseok’s mind. As was usual, lately. Where even to start? He wanted something straightforward and simple, and looked around at their tiny camp.

“What is your knife made of?” he asked.

Jongdae turned his head. The firelight and shadow played over his face such that Minseok could see the avian in its angles.

“Stone,” he said. “I don’t know your word for it. Stone like glass, that comes from the fire-mountains of the far north. It is sharp enough to pierce boar hide. It could take your head off in one blow, Scout Minseok.”

Those mischievous corners of Jongdae’s mouth were ever so slightly more curled. Minseok could’ve laughed with relief.

“I hope that’s not how you plan to use it,” he said.

Jongdae’s smile broadened just a little.

“I have no such immediate plans.”

Minseok grinned to himself while he gathered up the inedible parts of the badger and carried them away from camp, washed up.

Jongdae had wrapped the cooled remains of dinner in leaves by the time he got back, and was pulling a dark blanket out of one pack. It looked impossibly delicate. Jongdae caught Minseok staring and handed it over. It was so light that Minseok could barely feel its weight and so soft that it caught in the calluses on his hands.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Minseok said.

“It’s made of the hair of a goat that lives in our mountains,” Jongdae said.

“A very delicious goat,” he added after a moment.

He looked startled at Minseok’s smile.

Minseok’s wool blanket seemed rough and bulky by comparison. Jongdae touched the corner of it tentatively. His fingers were pale but rather stubby, though he held them gracefully.

“This is. Fur from the creature that is not a goat. It is. Fluffy? Like a hatchling?”

Minseok nodded, and couldn’t help grinning again.

“Sheep,” he said. “Also delicious.”

There was Jongdae’s broad smile again. It had just as much of an impact the second time.

They rolled into their blankets on either side of the banked coals. Minseok lay on his side and tried not to stare too much at Jongdae’s profile.

Surely this would be easier when they reached their destination and had a task to perform. With something to focus on, surely he would no longer spend every second wanting only to gaze at Jongdae. Would no longer be in this welter of confusion as to why they were here, together, but not bonded.

Though how they could scout effectively without it, Minseok had no idea.

“Obsidian,” he said.

Jongdae turned his head.

“The stone your knife is made of. We call it obsidian.”

“Sleep, Scout Minseok,” Jongdae said.

The morning was cold enough that Minseok took several moments to stretch himself into comfortable movement while Jongdae shook the badger skin free of dirt and bugs, rubbed a couple handfuls of ash into the skin, and rolled it up to tie to one of his packs. They had cold badger for breakfast and another day’s walk uphill. Jongdae foraged throughout the day, several times stepping off their path, twice pulling Minseok with him. By the end of the day, they had a number of wild greens, a dozen wild persimmons, and the food bag from the camp was full of hickory nuts.

Minseok felt easier by the time they stopped for the night, despite the added weight. They had worked smoothly together. He didn’t know what the hunting would be like at elevation. He didn’t know how rigorous the scouting would be, what their living conditions would be like, what it would be like to live side by side in so much silence. How soon the snows would start.

Every calorie against that was insurance.

There was even a likely-looking quiet pool in the stream they stopped by. Minseok gave in to optimism and dug out his packet of fishing line and hooks from its unfortunate location halfway down one pack. The three fat trout he came back with were worth it. Jongdae cleaned them and put them on sticks to roast in front of the fire.

Minseok was pleased. One more day of hard climbing, and they could find a place to settle, get to work. A good trout stream one day away was another form of insurance. Wild persimmon and hickory trees less than two days away.

He whistled to himself a little while he repacked his bag, ignoring Jongdae’s quizzical stare. Minseok never understood why allowing items breathing space outside a bag made them so much more reluctant to go efficiently back into said bag.

“What is this?” Jongdae asked, touching the kit at Minseok’s knee.

Minseok hadn’t noticed Jongdae coming so close.

“That’s a – first-aid kit, actually,” he said. “For you. In your avian form.”

Jongdae’s surprise happened mostly in his eyebrows. He opened the kit as if it might bite him, pulling items out to examine them, head cocked.

He turned the tube of antibiotic cream over in his fingers, gave Minseok a wry glance that Minseok didn’t understand at the bottle of preen oil. Held up the syringe. Minseok blushed.

“If you’re too weak to change or to feed,” he said.

Jongdae’s eyebrows shot up.

“Of course one hopes not to need it,” Minseok added.

One of the fish was looking toasty; after he’d turned it around, he looked back to see Jongdae lifting the hood out of the kit bag.

He glared at Minseok, then hissed.

“You will not hood me,” he snarled, and threw the hood into the woods.

Which – of course he wouldn’t. Airlings were sentient beings. The hood wasn’t for Jongdae.

“My grandmother made that for me,” Minseok said.

She hadn’t known. No civilians knew anything about the air scouts, other than the most vague rumors. She had genuinely thought his job would have something to do with falconry.

“Why grand, your mother?” Jongdae asked, looking confused.

He didn’t understand either, couldn’t have, his reaction was perfectly normal. There was no reason to feel so miserable about it. About one small object of nothing more than sentimental importance. Minseok sighed.

“My father’s mother,” he said.

Jongdae’s hands fluttered.

“It was a gift from your nest?”

Like Jongdae’s boots, he supposed. A thing passed down.

“Like that, yes. She thought I would be hawking. She didn’t know about your people, I would never.”

Jongdae made a low whistling sound, then stalked off into the trees.

Minseok caught the fish before they burned to a crisp, at least, rescuing them from the fire and setting them down to cool. How did he keep screwing this up? Just when things had seemed to be easier.

Jongdae came back.

He held out the hood, dropped it into Minseok’s hand. Minseok smoothed the bright silk tufts at the top to brush the dust off of them.

“I am sorry,” Jongdae said.

It was the last thing he said all night.

The next morning was harder not just because of Jongdae’s silence, but also because the terrain banked more steeply just on the other side of the flat area where they’d camped. The trees were starting to thin out as well, and the thinner air made harder going. Minseok thought that if they could push through, they’d make their destination just after midday, allowing time to at least start making camp before nightfall.

To do what? Sit silently, not looking at one another again?

Minseok couldn’t believe that the outcome of all his waiting and training was this – disaster. The army needed their eyes up here. It was counting on them, he _must_ find a way to make this work. Maybe he should apologize again. He should definitely apologize again. There had to be some compromise they could come to. Jongdae had volunteered for this, come to an unfamiliar land, it wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t even his war. Minseok was older, and a professional. This was his territory. It was his responsibility to support Jongdae however he could; Jongdae provided the eyes, he was just here to translate and transmit, to ensure that Jongdae could do his job –

Jongdae put his hand on Minseok’s arm.

“Scout,” he said.

He sighed. 

“Minseok.”

Minseok couldn’t see any anger in Jongdae’s expression. Merely unhappiness and worry. Minseok figured he must look similar.

“I keep. Hurting you,” Jongdae said.

“No!” Minseok said, “no, not at all -”

He stopped when Jongdae squeezed his arm.

“Minseok. My fear is not your fault.”

His? His what?

“You’re afraid?”

There was the tilted-head, penetrating stare Minseok had gotten used to, despite the short length of time they’d known one another.

“What did you think was my state?”

Minseok chewed his lip.

“I thought you were angry.”

Jongdae’s expression softened.

“Not angry,” he said.

They walked on.

“I have very little training,” Jongdae said a couple of minutes later.

Minseok could only gawk at him.

“There was – argument, at my coming. Chanyeol has trained for five … is it ‘years,’ the word?”

“Yes.”

“I speak your language well, because I helped him learn. But the rest of it. I know little of your people, Minseok. I have only trained since mid-winter. I never thought it would be so. Strange.”

Less than a year. And then to leave home, possibly forever.

“Why come now? Why not wait another season?”

“No one else wanted to serve. I did not wish my nest-brother to be alone.”

“And now you’re here without him, after just days.”

Jongdae glanced at him, sharp and sad.

“Yes.”

Minseok turned all this over in his mind while he put one foot in front of the other up the steady incline. Perhaps it would seem disrespectful of Jongdae’s turmoil, but Minseok wanted to sit on the ground and laugh with relief to know this wasn’t something he had done wrong.

“I think any pairing must have some confusion at first,” he said. “But when I do something that seems strange to you, just ask. If knowing will make things easier for you. It was bound to be strange no matter how much training you have, you’re so far from home, and now from Chanyeol too. It’s my job to be your support, and if that’s not enough: I’ll be to you whatever I can, Jongdae.”

But again, he had said the wrong thing. Jongdae’s face went angry.

“What you can,” he said, and stalked off.

Minseok followed him, because there was simply nothing else to be done.

Their path got suddenly steeper, rough with gnarled tree roots. That neither of them hesitated to reach for the other to steady them comforted Minseok. When they made it onto slightly flatter ground, Jongdae stopped.

“I _am_ angry,” he said. “There is one way that I am very angry.”

Well, at least if he knew about it, he could apologize and they could move forward. Minseok waited.

“It - disappoints me. To have come this far for a scout and find you already mated, when you are meant to be mine.”

“Find me _what_?”

Jongdae grimaced.

“This is why I would not change in the camp. I have no wish to speak to your mate, ever.”

The way his hands and head moved reminded Minseok of the way Jongdae’s feathers would rise and settle when he was perturbed in his other form.

“I cannot _believe_ Chanyeol,” Jongdae muttered.

“You think Baekhyun is my mate?”

Minseok had no mental space to even attempt to modify his tone. Jongdae’s head snapped around.

“It is obvious,” he said.

“We are not mates,” Minseok said.

Jongdae climbed. Minseok followed.

It was certainly a reason that he could never have guessed, though it had been clear that Jongdae didn’t like Baekhyun. But: why would that make Jongdae so very angry? They were permanent partners, what did “meant to be mine” even mean?

“You share a nest,” Jongdae growled.

Finally something with a simple response.

“Everyone in camp shares with someone. We had no partners, so we shared with each other. We trained together and have been close friends for a long time.”

Jongdae glared at him sidelong.

“You share a sleeping space in that nest.”

Minseok blinked slowly at him.

“I hope to do the same with you when the weather gets cold, otherwise we’ll both suffer.”

Jongdae’s ears turned red, and he climbed faster.

“You stand close together,” he said. “You sit close. Hold your faces close together when you speak.”

It took Minseok a moment to save up sufficient breath, given Jongdae’s pace.

“As I said, we’re close friends. Perhaps like nest-mates.”

Jongdae turned fast enough that Minseok flinched and almost pitched backwards, except for Jongdae’s steadying arm.

“Not like nest-mates,” he snarled, his grip too tight. “You put your mouth on his mouth.”

Yixing had not been kidding about them “observing,” one supposed.

“That doesn’t make us mates,” Minseok said.

“It is what mates do,” Jongdae hissed.

This was a topic never even touched on in any of his training. Minseok felt pinned down by that gaze.

“You never took that kind of comfort with someone you’re close to?”

He tried to make his voice gentle, in case the content of the question was too sharp. Jongdae flinched and let his arm go, turned away.

“It was not the way hatchlings play with one another,” Jongdae muttered.

“Of course not. Baekhyun and I are men. But that doesn’t make us mates.”

Jongdae leaned close, as if he were trying to find something in Minseok’s eyes.

“You do not wish it? To be mated to Baekhyun?”

“No,” Minseok said. “All I have wanted for a long time was to be a partnered scout.”

The nictitating membrane fluttered over Jongdae’s eyes several times.

“You are that,” Jongdae whispered.

“Yes.”

As Jongdae walked on, Minseok didn’t know whether he stood on a precipice or at a corner.

“Not mates?” Jongdae asked shortly after.

“Definitely not.”

And then, a few minutes later, Jongdae grumbled,

“Chanyeol will be happy for that. He will put his mouth on Baekhyun’s mouth.”

Minseok tightened his lips to prevent anything that might look like a smile.

“The word is kissing,” he said.

“Chanyeol will definitely kissing Baekhyun,” Jongdae said.

It didn’t seem like the right moment for a grammar lesson, so Minseok left it.

They pushed through midday, over Jongdae’s protest, eating the last of the badger and a couple of the remaining pears from camp while they climbed, until they broke cover onto a small, open ledge that was their destination.

“Oh,” Jongdae said, craning his neck for the sky.

The ledge looked out over the valley that had housed the war for so long. It was a tiny outcropping, too windy and exposed for them to make it their temporary home, but a perfect spot for Jongdae to fly out from, and for Minseok to set up his communications equipment.

And, for the time being, a perfect spot to set his damned bags down. To watch Jongdae standing perfectly still, looking out across the valley. Something about his posture comforted Minseok.

“This is our task,” Jongdae said.

“Yes.”

Jongdae walked toward him.

“I should have trusted,” he said.

He curled one hand around the back of Minseok’s neck.

“I should have done this first.”

He leaned in and set his forehead against Minseok’s.

There was that sense of a distant hum that Minseok’s couldn’t quite hear, a feeling of pressure at his temples. The warmth of Jongdae’s breath against his face, the heat of his hand.

Minseok thought he heard his name – no, he _knew_ he heard his name, but he didn’t just hear it, he also felt it, his name with an overlay of eagerness, teasing at him, like someone trying to wake him too early in the morning.

_Minseok._

The pressure vanished in favor of a sensation as if his mind opened like a door.

_Yes._

There he was: Jongdae. Huge and bright and stubborn. Relieved and excited. Hungry, with aching legs and an equally achy longing to fly. He melted into Minseok, until Minseok couldn’t tell which of them sighed. He couldn’t say that he had been shaken to his foundations, when it was as if any cracks in his foundation had been filled by Jongdae.

Minseok realized that there had been a small, quiet place in the back of his mind that had been lonely his whole life.

And now it wasn’t lonely anymore.

“God,” Minseok breathed, and felt a throb of Jongdae’s triumph that this had worked, they were permanent now, “why me?”

Jongdae leaned back. The mind-bond went thin for a second, stretched, but Minseok reached for it and found Jongdae also reaching.

“Sit. I will show you.”

Minseok sat – ungracefully, because he wasn’t sure where the edges of his own body were at the moment – while Jongdae stripped. When he was naked, he grinned wide at Minseok, sprinted toward the cliff’s edge, and leapt into the sky. Minseok gasped at the second-hand feeling of change, at the rush of air around him.

Jongdae banked and circled low over his head.

_Close your eyes._

With his eyes closed, Minseok could focus on trying to feel Jongdae. He could feel the wind, sense how air moved around feathers.

He could.

Oh, he could see it. He could see the currents of the air, as if they were waves on the sea. He could see the churned-up earth of the war zone, totally clear but as small as if it were made for a dolls’ battle. He could see colors he had no name for, feel how the wind tried to tumble him – no, Jongdae – with a cold gust, feel the pleasure of beating wings against it, dropping down out of the turbulence, turning.

He could see himself: a riot of energies, white flames swirling around him, like he was a living blizzard, but in the center a still figure, steady, beating like a heart. Minseok could feel Jongdae’s pride, looking at him. That his partner, his mind-bonded, was this strong, this solid.

This beautiful.

It was too much. Minseok recoiled from the bond. As it stretched thin again, panic rose up in him and he tried to clutch at it but felt it slipping away from him, even as he physically reached out one hand and opened his eyes, then reeled at the sight of the “real” world.

Jongdae landed by him, knelt, embraced him.

“We are each other’s now,” he said, low, in Minseok’s ear.

Minseok held onto him, taking advantage of the darkness of his face pressed against Jongdae’s neck to see inside again. Jongdae was there. Was all around him.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry I fought it,” Minseok babbled.

It was so vexing trying to hold onto Jongdae, he was so naked. Jongdae tightened his arms and crooned. Minseok breathed in the scent of his skin.

“I have never known a time when I was not able to share my thoughts,” Jongdae said. “Save the past few days, when we have been too far away for me to hear Chanyeol. It’s lonely, Minseok. I am glad to hear you.”

Minseok discovered himself to be shaking. And, when Jongdae sat back and swiped thumbs under his eyes, crying.

“This is much for you. I hear it. I feel how your heart beats too fast. But you cannot break this bond by pulling away when it overcomes you. It is stronger than that. And I will always be waiting to hear you again.”

Minseok fell into Jongdae’s certainty and let it calm him, felt Jongdae’s pride that he did so. Felt his contentment. And a small thread of relief that made Minseok grin.

Jongdae smiled back, his hands still cupped around Minseok’s face.

A cascade of images and words twined together fell through his mind, which meant a question, but he couldn’t parse it immediately. Jongdae laughed, and Minseok reeled again, from too much going on inside and out, too much beauty, too much too-muchness.

Jongdae’s thumb stroked his cheek.

_What is our task?_

This was accompanied by a slow parade of images: the battlefield, Minseok’s clothes flapping against his body in the wind, sunset, and a campfire.

“It’s like learning a language,” Minseok whispered.

Jongdae nodded and a sense of urgency plucked at Minseok, the sunset again.

He tried to think of the campfire, then smiled reflexively when Jongdae was so pleased to get the message. But he couldn’t think of how to say the rest of it, or how to make words loud enough in his head for Jongdae to hear them.

“Speak aloud,” Jongdae said. “We have time to practice.”

Jongdae sat back on his heels, but Minseok felt a bubble of his pleasure that Minseok reached one hand out so they’d maintain contact.

“You’re right,” Minseok said. “We need shelter, at least for tonight, if we don’t have time to set up something more permanent. And you’ll need to hunt if we want something more than dried rations for dinner. I have to let Joonmyun know that we’ve arrived.”

“You do not know a campsite?”

Minseok shook his head.

“This ledge has been used before, so it’s marked on our maps. But there were no notes on where that pair bunked down. It can’t have been here, though, it’s far too windy.”

Jongdae nodded.

“I will take you flying with me again. Look through my eyes and tell me where we shall live.”

Minseok’s internal “oh - again?” must’ve carried, at least the trembling disbelief part of it, because Jongdae grinned at him.

“We can fly for fun any other time you like, Minseok. But today we need shelter, so you must pay attention.”

There was so much to pay attention to: wind currents, little rippling movements on the ground that he knew through Jongdae meant living creatures. The needles on the trees. Jongdae made slow circles around the cliff, and by the fourth one, Minseok had regained a fingerhold on equilibrium and could ignore enough of the visual input to scan the terrain.

The cliff looked southwest. Off to the left, slightly upslope, a bit less than a kilometer away, there was a tiny clearing backed up against rock face with water dripping down it, and enough trees to block much of the wind.

His “there,” although not in words, seemed to get through. Minseok felt agreement, then a not-entirely-pleasant sensation of his feet closing around something wet and warm, which he supposed meant that Jongdae was off to hunt.

It was difficult to concentrate around the mind-bond enough to set up his wireless array. His hands were clumsy in his distraction. Once the solar panel was set up, he tried to relax without sinking into Jongdae’s consciousness, to let it run in the background of his mind while the panel charged.

He jumped when he felt Jongdae’s focus tighten and a sense of the ground rushing at him fast, followed by a shock and a struggle – so he didn’t jump several minutes later when Jongdae dropped a dead pika by him and flew off again. He dressed it, finishing just after the panel beeped its readiness.

He located the code for the day and reported their arrival. After several minutes, he received a confirmation back, along with “no updates. hold position. watch.”

And, after a pause, “report on team function.”

Minseok had to smile. He felt Jongdae’s curiosity about the pulse of warmth. This was Joonmyun, checking on him.

“cohesive unit,” he sent back.

It was silly to think of the “confirm” that he received back as a cheer, but he did anyway.

Jongdae swooped in with a second pika minutes later, changed and wiped his feet cleanish before he put his clothes back on.

“Sun batteries!” he said, looking pleased to see the solar panels. “We have these at home.”

“You do?”

“Of course. Much better than the loud machines the camp has to make light.”

For all his preparation and study, Minseok knew almost nothing about the airlings’ homeland. He wanted to hear _everything_.

If they were up here for long, they’d certainly have time for it.

“Message sent. No orders other than to watch,” Minseok said.

He saw a fire in his mind, had a sense of a full belly and sleep. He nodded, and Jongdae grinned.

There was one tricky bit climbing to their chosen camping spot. But if they could shore it up with some flat stones – and not have to traverse it carrying heavy bags and bleeding animals – it would be no problem. The spot itself felt like a relief, sheltered from the wind. Even better, the craggy rock face had a small overhang, jutting out just behind a boulder taller than they would be if Jongdae stood on Minseok’s shoulders, sheltered and partially hidden. A tight squeeze with all of their belongings, but with a little help it would make a snug shelter.

He tried to say “fire or shelter?” across the bond. Jongdae stared at him quizzically, and finally Minseok gave up and said it aloud.

“Oh, I thought you wanted to cook the meat on pine boughs again,” Jongdae said.

Minseok couldn’t even be annoyed at his failure, given how pleased Jongdae felt that he’d even tried.

By the time Jongdae had the fire going, Minseok had lashed together a mat of several layers of pine boughs to lean against the overhang so they had shelter on three sides. His mind was already churning with ideas on how to somehow extend the mat out horizontally and give them more room, using the tarp, maybe, and pitons in the rock to secure it, except they needed the tarp for ground cover –

Jongdae gave him the mental image of a chipmunk rushing around. He whirled around to see Jongdae grinning.

“Busy mind,” he said.

In lieu of thinking something rude at his brand-new bond-partner, Minseok dragged their bags to the shelter and went to set the cooking pot under the water trickling down the rock face. Then he let himself crouch down to simply watch Jongdae.

The obsidian knife was as long as his forearm, but Jongdae used it with a grace that spoke of long familiarity, cleaning up the pikas and scraping their hides. He was so careful with the meat, prying every shred off the bones, setting even those carefully off to one side.

Minseok felt a snap of amusement in his mind, followed by another one of those swift series of images. He pondered it for a minute.

“You want me to soak the pelts?”

“Just the badger,” Jongdae said aloud, "set these others out for insects to assist.”

Easy enough, especially when accompanied by the internal warmth of Jongdae’s satisfaction. Minseok got another message while he was weighting the badger skin downslope in the runoff from their rock and returned with a handful of thin twigs.

“My bonded is a quick learner,” Jongdae purred.

Minseok wondered how long all this would be so _very_ distracting.

Jongdae grinned.

“You will grow used to it,” he said. “And you will learn how to keep things to yourself when you wish. It is the newness, and that we experience the world differently from one another. Though it will always be easy to kindle immediacy when we are close together.”

Minseok took a moment to be very careful not to have any thoughts whatsoever about any variety of “close together.”

Jongdae’s eyebrows knit together.

“I did not intend for you to practice keeping your thoughts private so soon,” he grumbled.

There was no discomfort left between them. They sat side by side upwind of the fire while Jongdae frizzled thin strips of meat on the twigs and they watched the stars come out. Exhaustion and gladness would’ve fought a battle for dominance in Minseok’s head, if he hadn’t been so, well, exhausted and glad. Jongdae's thoughts were a constant hum in the background of his mind, also tired but satisfied, with a tumble of plans for the camp and a wide curiosity about their first scouting mission the next day. Through Jongdae, Minseok could halfway hear the rustle of all the little things that lived near them and see, far downslope, ripples in the air in one of those unseeable colors that Jongdae suspected was a wolverine and hoped was not a small bear.

“You see so much,” he murmured.

And Jongdae must’ve turned to look at him, because then he saw himself with firelight playing over his own face.

He knew that he wasn’t an ugly man, but a lifetime of mirrors had shown him that he didn’t look like _that_. He elbowed Jongdae.

“False modesty,” Jongdae said, and gave a crack of laughter.

Squashed under the overhang with the dim light of what remained of the solar panel’s lantern function, Minseok learned that his bond-partner was a bossy, opinionated bastard. Also a little bit of a snob.

Minseok received a large dose of derision over their bond, directed at his tarp (too loud), his sleeping bag (smelled strange), and the need to wind his watch.

“It is a meaningless division of time.”

“It’s how I know what day it is so I can use the right code,” Minseok mumbled.

Though he had to admit that the buckskin Jongdae unrolled to use as a ground cover instead of the tarp would be both quieter and warmer than the tarp. And Jongdae’s insistence that they layer buckskin/sleeping bag/wool blanket was accompanied by a feeling of hesitancy that made Minseok grasp Jongdae’s arm in question.

“You said we would – sleep close,” Jongdae muttered into his pack.

Given the way the thing between them solidified and deepened every time they touched one another, Minseok could think of few things he wanted more, and they all involved the end of the war.

“Of course,” he said, then exhaled at the bright flare of gladness in his mind.

Jongdae’s light goat-hair blanket was warm, and Jongdae himself even warmer. Minseok felt so odd, sinking into sleep when sleep also included Jongdae humming in his mind and Jongdae draped over him like a slightly bony extra blanket. He woke in the middle of the night with his face mashed against the pine boughs of the lean-to, having been shoved aside in favor of Jongdae sprawling. He rolled over and tucked Jongdae firmly under his arm in a tight hold. Jongdae muttered, dreaming of something dim and warm that pulled Minseok back into sleep with him.

There was frost in the morning, a reminder that they had little time to shore up the camp before the snow. But it was difficult for Minseok to maintain the sense of gravity that warranted, knowing that Jongdae would take his first scout flight, and finally understanding what that meant.

They stood on the cliff in the morning sun, with Jongdae’s eyes and Minseok’s spyglass, planning the first sweep around the perimeter. Minseok could feel Jongdae practically vibrating with eagerness. He jumped into the sky like he’d been waiting for it forever.

Minseok sat on the cliff, straight-backed and still as his instructors had taught him. He tried to make his own mind empty so he could see through Jongdae’s eyes and nothing else. Just see. Interpret later.

It was difficult to see, when there was so much to feel. He could say that he felt the air, but it was so many different levels of “air”: the chill; the pressure of the wind against and through feathers, both buoying and a thing to push against with each wingbeat; the visible currents that could be used or avoided as needed. Minseok could feel that some of it was instinct for Jongdae, tilting or falling through knots of air pressure. Some of it, though was just fun.

But it wasn’t difficult to prod Jongdae into remembering that he needed to fly southwest and examine the outer edge of the battle zone. Which was extremely strange. Jongdae stuck to wide circles on the northern end, but even there, from what Minseok understood in 3 years of reports and analysis, nothing was as it should’ve been. There were maybe a tenth the number of soldiers Minseok would’ve expected, and those who remained were playing cards or standing around smoking with their hands in their pockets, as if they were at home in their neighborhoods to the south with no cares in the world.

Almost as strange were the bowl-like depressions in the ground scattered around, too smooth to have been dug by human hands, though Minseok had never seen a machine that could make anything like it.

Minseok felt how his unease bled into Jongdae, who flew back to the cliff tired enough that he only pulled on his leggings before he fell on the food Minseok had set out for him. It was so odd, Minseok hardly knew how to report it. But on day one, analysis was impossible. All he could do was describe. He sent the message, received his confirmation, and resumed brooding until such time (only a short while after) that Jongdae tired of hearing it.

“Do this later,” he said. “We need more food and more shelter first.”

They bickered over the hunting question. Minseok knew he would’ve fretted about it without the bond, but he could feel that Jongdae’s exasperation had nothing mean behind it – it was merely the arrogance of a predator. Though he did look over Minseok’s bow with a practiced and approving eye. And Minseok could bend. If he got stir-crazy, presumably Jongdae would feel it, and off he would go.

“If it is a bear over there,” Jongdae mused.

“Then you’d need to come get me to grab my rifle?” Minseok asked.

Minseok was not particularly amazed by how much rudeness could be conveyed over a mind-bond. He tried to send over reassurance anyway, and agreement. Jongdae looked confused by his efforts.

“You’re right that we need bigger stores than pikas and rabbits,” Minseok said.

“Ah,” Jongdae said. “I see that now. I am also learning a language. Yours.”

Minseok tried to tamp down the embarrassment/flatteredness that rushed through him, though by the smile that slid across Jongdae’s face, he wasn’t successful.

They settled into a routine. They took scouting flights at different times each day, never seeing anything different, being told to hold position and keep watching. Minseok had been trained to bear boredom, but there was none. There was so much to do to hedge their bets against winter. And when they had finished hunting and shoring up the camp for the day, there was Jongdae.

 _While_ they were hunting and shoring up the camp, there was Jongdae. He was amused by and interested in Minseok’s efforts to create a warm, more spacious sleeping space. Minseok wondered why he had assigned himself the task of binding together so many mats of pine boughs and wished he’d packed more rope. The pitons caught Jongdae’s interest immediately, his question lighting up the inside of Minseok’s head.

“They’re for climbing,” Minseok said.

He opened his mouth to describe, but Jongdae said, “show me.”

This, too, was part of each day: playing with their connection, practicing how to clarify what they wanted to say and how to make private spaces in their own minds. Practicing how to concentrate even when they sat shoulder to shoulder and how to hear one another when they were far apart, without having to blend so completely that Minseok was incapable of anything but that still, meditative posture.

Not that those times when he sat still, eyes closed, and sank down into Jongdae’s mind during flight weren’t usually the best part of the day.

Minseok tried to dredge up sense memories of climbing, the concentration needed to balance and drive pitons into stone while ignoring muscle strain, the need to check and re-check ties, each spike and rope the only things preventing one from falling. He could feel Jongdae’s curiosity that anyone could ever fear heights.

“One who was very stubborn could use these to climb to my homeland,” Jongdae murmured.

Minseok couldn’t help thinking of Kibum, and Jongdae smiled.

“He needs only to be patient,” Jongdae said. “That is their agreement, that BoA would raise her hatchlings, stay for the duration of one nest, then return to her bonded.”

Minseok blinked at him.

“You did not know that?”

“No.”

And there was a thread of something, some discomfort in Jongdae’s mind that he tried to conceal, and Minseok remembered Kibum’s face after she left, how long he refused to speak, how even the other airlings tried to comfort him and he turned away. He grabbed Jongdae’s arm without thought, panic drowning out the sound of anything else.

Jongdae stared at him, wide-eyed, then leaned in to touch their foreheads together. From that close contact, Minseok could hear denial, reassurance, apology over the blood rushing in his ears.

“Come, sit,” Jongdae said when Minseok’s brain no longer fizzed with alarm.

Minseok hesitated.

“Sit,” Jongdae repeated. “There is much daylight left, and time to pause.”

Minseok sat by their fire, crackling despite the relative warmth of the afternoon simply because it was easier to keep it going than relight it every day. He sat, knees up and chin on them, and tried not to broadcast his lingering upset. A “nest” was approximately 30 years. Thirty years of separation. He and Jongdae hadn’t even had a week, and already Minseok couldn’t imagine it. They were still strangers to one another in many ways, and yet the thought of his voice going silent in Minseok’s mind was unbearable.

He watched Jongdae switch out the cookpot under the trickle of water for some kind of soft-sided canister that brought with it the mental image of warm, leather-flavored water and disgust. Minseok snorted. Jongdae set the pot over the flame and tossed a handful of dried plant matter into it.

“We need better water storage,” he said.

“It won’t matter when the snow starts,” Minseok said.

Jongdae huffed.

“We need better fire protection.”

“That I agree with.”

Jongdae sat close by him, the sides of their bodies touching.

“Listen,” Jongdae said.

Minseok closed his eyes and saw in his mind and saw a small airling woman with bright yellow eyes and Jongdae’s smile-curved mouth, sitting with an amber-eyed man with the same square chin.

“My egg-parents,” Jongdae said.

An added man, much taller, black-eyed.

“Chanyeol’s egg-father. Our nest-parents.”

Minseok could feel Jongdae’s fondness for them, and knew that his mother was warm but had a wicked sense of humor, that Jongdae’s relationship with his – egg-father – was one of deep respect that wasn’t always easy.

“Are you really hatched from eggs?”

Minseok tried immediately to send an apology for his rudeness, but he felt Jongdae’s amusement.

“Some of us. It depends on the mating.”

Minseok saw a smallish avian with feathers of mottled browns and pale grey eyes.

“My mother’s nest-sister,” Jongdae said. “She hatched from an egg and has never seen fit to use her non-winged form. Most of us are born without feathers, for the easier raising to speech and awareness. My mother-sister is a valued watcher in our skies, but it is hard to remember that she is ours, and not simply a mind-bonded bird.”

Minseok thought about what his people would do with a predator able to understand and follow complex directions but not talk back and grimaced.

“It strains your loyalties?” Jongdae asked.

Maybe it would’ve strained the loyalties of Minseok from the week prior. But now, with their minds entwined throughout one another’s?

This was why the air scouts were small and secretive. Minseok might never fly, but he had two people now – his own and the airlings. His loyalty to Jongdae, new as it was, ran as deep as his loyalty to his own core.

However that thought looked from the outside, it made Jongdae embrace him.

“Show me your family,” Jongdae murmured in his ear.

Minseok hadn’t seen his family in the more than 3 years since he graduated from training. And his memories weren’t as visual as an airling’s. He thought about the softness of his sister’s hair, braiding it for her before school, and the freesia perfume his mother wore. The way they would sit together as a family in the front room after dinner, in the dim light of oil lamps to reduce the load on the city’s war-strained power supply, his mother telling stories that made history seem so much more exciting than dull lists of dates, and her high, delighted laugh.

His father’s hands, callused from work and stained by motor oil, and the way they curled gently over Minseok’s, teaching him how to change a tire, or replace a doorknob, or some other simple task. He remembered his grandmother sitting directly under the lamp, always with sewing in her lap, or his sister’s head, hand stroking her hair. He remembered standing with all of them at graduation, him proud in his uniform with his brand-new glove in his belt, all of them in their nicest clothes, standing stiffly for a photograph.

There was a swirl of longing, missing, love, and resignation. Minseok didn’t know which of them it came from.

Jongdae pulled away and leaned forward to pull the cookpot off the fire, now steaming and the liquid in it pale yellow. Jongdae poured some into a shallow wooden cup, blew on it, and handed it to Minseok. The tea had a creamy, delicate flavor. When he had refilled the cup and had his own drink, Jongdae leaned close again.

“You asked me about play,” Jongdae said.

Minseok closed his eyes again, saw two faces, young airling women. One had large, round eyes and the other a broad grin. Minseok could feel the memory of Jongdae’s hand wrapped over bare skin and gasping breath.

Minseok retreated into his own mind. It wasn’t a surprise, to learn that Jongdae preferred women. It was, after all, the usual way of things for most humans, to prefer a gender different from one’s own. Plenty of bond-partners had, so far as he knew, platonic relationships, if ones closer than most humans could understand.

So if his notions about the mind-bond – as romantic as Baekhyun’s – needed to be adjusted, so be it. He would take Jongdae’s voice in his mind under whatever circumstances he could get. Other needs could always be satisfied elsewhere.

“They’re your future mates?” Minseok asked.

“No,” Jongdae said, “and stop hiding.”

Minseok opened his mind’s door a bit and felt Jongdae’s warm amusement.

“They are each other’s future mates, intended since they were chicks,” Jongdae said. “And unless they change their minds in my absence, they asked me long ago to assist them with hatchlings when we all come of age.”

Minseok supposed it was better to know ahead of time that he would have a fate like Kibum’s. It would give him time to prepare, to protect himself. But he couldn’t help asking.

“For thirty years, then? A … nest?”

Jongdae tightened his hold and leaned his head against Minseok’s. Minseok had a sense of their hands clasped and reassurance. It helped him take a deep breath.

“No, my bonded,” Jongdae said. “If I were pledged to a full nest, we would hammer a thousand metal spikes into rock and I would make Chanyeol help haul you up the cliff face to be the first human in my homeland. One of your years, maybe. Only until I know my duty is done.”

Maybe Minseok would’ve felt ashamed of the relief that flooded through him, if it hadn’t been met with Jongdae’s quiet reassurance. He poked Minseok’s shoulder.

“I pledge to do my utmost to achieve that duty quickly.”

That Minseok frowned only made Jongdae’s filthy internal chuckle worse. But Minseok breathed into the bond anyway.

“You bear all this strangeness gracefully,” Jongdae said. “It is my honor to be bound with you.”

Minseok huffed aloud, although he knew Jongdae could hear that he was that mixture of pleased and embarrassed that made one’s face hot.

“It’s strange for you too,” he said by way of deflection.

Jongdae shrugged against his shoulder.

“I get to hunt and to fly. They are what I was hatched for. You will guide me through any strangeness about other things.”

They sat for a while longer, drinking the yellow tea and leaning on one another, sunk down into their combined thoughts – nothing much more than enjoyment of the rest and the sunshine.

By the time the sun went down, Minseok had rigged a very nice setup. It’d involved cutting the tarp into thirds, but they had relatively waterproofed mats that extended their shelter out in two directions, which would give them room to sit up and even shift around a bit if they got snowed in. He had pine boughs simply piled up on the eastern side, stacked high enough and weighted that only a tornado would shift them. “Comfortable” would be a bit of a stretch, but it was enough shelter to keep them going.

Jongdae dropped grouse onto the camp all afternoon, far more than they could eat in several days, practically singing to himself while he washed his hands and face. He dragged his blanket from their shelter and set about plucking his quarry. The blanket separated into two nearly transparent layers, and Jongdae stuffed the feathers between them, his happiness a buzz in the back of Minseok’s mind. He presented the puffed-out blanket to Minseok with a flourish that made Minseok laugh. By the time they went to sleep, the extra grouse had been smoked and wrapped up for storage in a cool crevice at the back of their shelter, and the feather-stuffed blanket was like sleeping under a warm cloud.

More scouting days, more orders to hold. The southern soldiers continued to sit bored in their camp, and more of the strange bowl-like depressions appeared every few days, moving outward from their camp. On the northwestern edge of the camp, a large new tent went up, with machines carried into it. Knowing their patrol route, Minseok would’ve given a season’s pay for the chance to talk to Baekhyun and get some finer detail about that tent. He puzzled over how to describe the machines in his reports.

Minseok found himself less distracted by Jongdae’s presence inside his head at every moment, other than when they were actually communicating. He still reached for it in off-moments, though. Each time Minseok dropped into the hum of their connection, Jongdae would look up from whatever he was doing and smile.

During their long hours of down time, they talked over the things Jongdae saw on his flights. About what it had been like for Minseok, growing up in a city never having known anything but the seemingly far-off war: a thing that meant oil lamps and sometimes cold water or cold rooms. It meant that meat and fruit were luxuries, but he had never actually gone hungry. It meant that everyone had several lost family members to mourn on memorial days. But for 30 years his little country had held the line in this valley against invaders from the south, so to him, this was simply life.

“But why do they wish to have your country at all?”

Minseok shrugged.

“Because they’re bigger and richer and feel like they can.”

Jongdae, from a country even smaller and more sparsely populated, didn’t bother to soften his disgust.

After a dawn scouting flight a few days later, Minseok declared his intention to hike down to the trout stream to fish and to wash his clothes before it got too cold to do so.

“I’ll stay here,” Jongdae said. “I have skins to tend to, and we can practice hearing at a distance.”

Unencumbered, the walk to the trout stream only took a couple of hours. Minseok enjoyed stretching his legs, and being cleaner, even if the process of _getting_ cleaner was cold enough to send his balls into retreat and shock him until he heard Jongdae’s mental laughter as clearly as if they’d been next to one another. They tossed images back and forth all morning while Minseok drowsed between tugs on his fishing lines. It was quieter, fuzzier, at distance, aside from when Jongdae woke him with a sharp mental jab and the image of sunset. Minseok tried thinking hard of a brood hen, wings spread over her chicks. Jongdae's outrage was so clear that Minseok could almost hear the words.

Nonetheless, he gathered their mostly dry clothing and his 8 trout and climbed back up the mountain. However Jongdae had spent his day, he was pleased about it. Minseok found himself walking quickly, pulled along by Jongdae’s anticipation. And a good thing – the sun was quite low in the sky when he crested the hill where their camp lay, gold slanting across the valley in front of them and the camp itself dim.

Jongdae was crouched over a well-built-up fire. He looked up to grin, and Minseok’s mind went completely blank as a defense mechanism.

Jongdae had a thick stripe of black from eyebrow to just below his eyes, from the inner corner of each eye, swept back across his temples into his hair – just like the dark line of feathers he had around his eyes in his avian form. He stood, wearing an expression that Minseok could only describe as “wicked” so far back in his mind that even he couldn’t hear it.

Minseok had seen Jongdae naked for a not-insignificant portion of each day since they first made their acquaintance with both of them having opposable thumbs. It was part of the form-changing process, and Minseok hadn't found it to affect him.

The dark green leather leggings Jongdae wore hung so low that the hollows above his hips showed, which somehow seemed more naked than actually naked – especially given that they were laced in the center front with pale rawhide that drew the eye. The open vest was bad enough – itself pale brown suede embroidered with geometric shapes in the same green as the leggings – but Jongdae also had a black line painted over each collarbone that met in the middle and dipped in a line that stopped just above his navel. Which also suggested a particular path for one’s eye to take.

“Aren’t you cold?” Minseok asked in lieu of anything sensible while Jongdae gently divested him of his burdens.

“Very,” Jongdae said. “But I thought you would enjoy seeing how I look in my homeland.”

“Oh,” Minseok said. "Yes.”

Jongdae's amusement echoed around Minseok’s still-blank head.

“Only for special occasions, of course, although I wear this eye paint most days,” Jongdae said.

He touched the side of his face with two fingers.

“It pleases me to resemble my winged form.”

“Ah. Of course,” Minseok said.

Jongdae grinned, and his eyebrows canted up in the center.

“This is for my family,” he said, and used turning to show his arm as an excuse to step closer to Minseok.

He had a gold bangle around his bicep, tied with a knot of feathers of widely varying sizes, mostly in shades of cream and brown.

“One feather from each member of my nest,” he said in a low murmur. “And this one, of course, for me.”

He reached up to play with a flight feather hanging from a small braid over his ear.

Minseok couldn’t even allow himself the thought of how much he wanted to fall on Jongdae and spend the remaining hours of the day sucking marks into his skin along those black lines on his chest. Because any thought he had, Jongdae would _hear_.

Jongdae stepped closer still, and on the uneven ground, Minseok was forced to either recoil or reach out. Of course he reached out, by instinct. He was still warm from his climb, and Jongdae’s skin was like ice. Minseok felt like he was grasping marble, his hand a furnace around Jongdae’s ribs, his heart racing. Jongdae made a slow blink, white sliding over black, and his smile was wide but dark.

“Now I must make a change in my appearance,” Jongdae said.

He lifted a tiny pot in one hand, dipped his thumb in it, and ran a line of rich blue down his forehead to the tip of his nose, staring at Minseok the whole time. He dipped his thumb again and pressed it to Minseok’s forehead, clicked his tongue at Minseok’s startle, and drew a similar line down Minseok’s nose.

“To show we are newly bonded,” Jongdae said, barely above a whisper.

Minseok didn’t even dare breathe, lest he think about the desire that roared in him, lest he think, lest he act, lest he wipe that smile off Jongdae’s face with something unwelcome or worse.

Jongdae stepped away, leaving Minseok to notice how dark it had gotten, how cold.

“You must leave that on your face, my bonded,” Jongdae said. “For luck.”

Minseok used the struggle of wrestling of cold, stiff fish onto sticks as an excuse to crouch by the fire and swear until he ran out of curses. Eventually, Jongdae flopped down next to him, fully covered, if his face still painted, and grinned broadly at Minseok’s growl.

He had wanted Minseok to practice keeping a private space in his mind – over the next several days, that became a necessity. He woke the next morning with Jongdae wrapped around him like a vine, mouth under his ear. It was not merely the usual way of mornings that had his cock aching. Minseok lay still, trying to breathe deeply without breathing in Jongdae’s maddening scent, until he felt he could sit up without any embarrassing protrusions.

Jongdae flew long past their scouting run. He circled the cliff slowly while Minseok sent his message, then dive-bombed him, laughing.

 _We will fly_.

Minseok closed his eyes and gave himself up to flight. Time was measured only in wingbeats. Jongdae danced with the wind as his partner, Minseok his passenger. They saw clouds building in the north, a small herd of deer downslope to the east. All the small, busy things in the forest busier than ever, digging or stuffing pine needles into the crevices of trees, and Minseok knew – because Jongdae knew – that in a couple of days, they’d have a storm. Jongdae asked, with a barrel roll and a long, shallow dive, whether he should keep flying, and Minseok answered back with the horizon, a never-ending yes.

After that they had a lazy afternoon in camp, both of them tired, although Minseok felt he had no right to be so, having merely sat still for several hours. Minseok cracked a pile of the hickory nuts while Jongdae worked on his pelts, all except that day’s rabbit now tanned with pika brains and smoked. Minseok watched him work the pelts to softness with his hands and a couple of smooth stones. Jongdae’s satisfaction the work was a pleasant background thrum.

“You enjoy that,” Minseok said.

He tried to hand Jongdae a slice of persimmon. Jongdae looked at his hands, cocked one eyebrow, and opened his mouth. Minseok concentrated on not brushing his thumb against Jongdae’s lower lip when he fed him the fruit.

“I do,” Jongdae said. “Chanyeol would laugh at me. I’ll owe him a boon when we see each other next. We had a bet, that I would go wild, living with my scout.”

Minseok fed him another slice of persimmon, catching his thumb on Jongdae’s bottom teeth in error, which made him shiver. But it didn’t seem to bother Jongdae, who was so pleased by their afternoon that it bled over as if into the very air.

“This isn’t usual for your people?”

Jongdae laughed.

“We have technology, Minseok! Look.”

Jongdae showed him solar panels on building roofs and clean, if narrow, streets. A farm plot with an automated irrigation system. A medical clinic as modern as anything in Minseok’s country that reminded him of the machines down in the southerners’ camp. He made a mental note to say that in his next report.

“Chanyeol likes machines. He likes to take them apart and put them together again. This is why he wished to serve among your people: to be near new machinery, especially your transportation.”

“And you?”

“I like to fly,” Jongdae said, “and to hunt. To make out of my prey as much as can be useful. By our nature, all of us learn to hunt winged. Few of us learn to hunt without feathers. It is harder, and very interesting. I like to be alone in the quiet of the forest, and the sharing of the day’s stories when the sun has set.”

But Jongdae looked quizzical at the rush of sadness Minseok couldn’t hide in time.

“Why bond, then? If you like to be alone?”

Even in this short span of time, the action of touching their foreheads together had become a thing that made the whole world feel safe to Minseok.

“To be with you is like being alone,” Jongdae said. “You make no pull against my nature. We are one though we are two, Minseok. I find only joy in your company.”

As if that weren’t enough to throw a man off his equilibrium, after they had eaten Jongdae pitched himself sideways to plant his head in Minseok’s lap and whined,

“Must I have wings to be preened?”

Minseok stared. Jongdae huffed and turned on his side to face the fire. When Minseok didn’t move, Jongdae reached back, took a hand, and placed it on his own head. Minseok’s fingers moved without volition, which made Jongdae sigh and give a pleased internal hum. Jongdae’s hair was stiffer than a human’s and cool to the touch. Minseok tried to think of all this proximity and contact as simple, pleasant interaction between bond-partners and not some kind of torture of inadvertent seduction.

He wasn’t very successful. Not then, and not in the morning, waking with Jongdae’s mouth pressed against his temple, one arm and leg thrown over him, the latter precariously close to the by-now daily morning inconvenience.

The clouds were thick that day with the impending storm – even the southern soldiers scurried around their camp, tying things down. Minseok pulled his parka out for the first time, and Jongdae a similarly padded jacket, though he set it to one side, broadcasting his intent to hunt.

Minseok spent the day checking and re-checking their shelter, making sure their food was safely tucked inside, up against the cold rock face. The stiff hide cover Jongdae had used to smoke his pelts and the grouse would shield their fire for a little while if the snow wasn’t too deep, but Minseok made the executive decision to dig a small fire pit inside their shelter. By the time he was done lining it and transferring a few coals over, plus fuel, the clouds had covered the tops of the mountains around them and the wind was blustery.

He’d been hearing the usual background noise of Jongdae hunting, but when he focused in, he found mostly exhaustion with a thread of smugness. His pulse of question was met with reassurance, so Minseok sat down to wait. He set Jongdae’s jacket and a pair of socks by the fire to warm.

He waited far longer than he wanted to. The snow would start any minute; already the light was as dim as at dusk.

And then Jongdae rustled through the trees on his feet, dragging a deer behind him, as pale as the snow about to cover them, aside from his lips, which were decidedly blue underneath the crust of blood.

“What are you doing?” Minseok shouted.

“Ruining my friends’ plans by freezing off my reproductive organs, it seems,” Jongdae said.

His attempt at a cheeky grin was ruined by the way his teeth chattered. He blinked at the blast of fury that Minseok didn’t attempt to conceal, then made it worse by cocking one eyebrow and pursing his lips.

“Get. Dressed,” Minseok growled at him.

Minseok almost knocked him out when Jongdae went to clean his feet in freezing-cold water before covering himself up. It was all Minseok could do to drag the deer carcass up to their shelter instead, and when Jongdae pulled out his knife and made to approach, Minseok snarled out loud.

“Your anger is warming me up, bond-partner,” Jongdae said wryly. “Also, we have little time to get this usable before the snow starts. You will have much time to yell at me while it snows.”

It was, sadly, a pertinent point. They made relatively short, relatively tidy work of taking the deer apart. Jongdae took his usual care with the hide but made a concession to speed for the rest of it.

“How did you even?” Minseok asked at one point.

Though it was obvious: the deer’s throat was a ruin. The thought of an avian Jongdae’s size trying to take down a deer was. Honestly, it was a bit ludicrous.

“We needed stores,” Jongdae said aloud with a shrug.

Internally, he was proud enough of himself that Minseok wanted to smack him – and would, if he had the barest _hint_ of frostbite. Hypothermia would’ve shown already. Given that the best solution for that involved bare skin on skin, Minseok took care to only be grateful on the surface of his mind and to bury any other thoughts about that deep.

They finished cutting the deer into manageable hunks before it had done much more than started to flurry. Minseok let Jongdae wash his hands, then bossed him into the sleeping bag. He was vexed, if unsurprised, to return from tossing the unused bits down the side of their hill and find Jongdae by the outside fire, already cooking up bits of venison. At least he was still in the sleeping bag, if only up to the waist. Minseok washed their knives and pulled Jongdae’s coat closer around his neck when he sat.

“Listen,” Jongdae said.

Minseok did so, and found Jongdae to be chilly but not in pain and highly amused by Minseok’s annoyance. Minseok let this flare, and Jongdae laughed. They had time to cook probably a day’s worth of food before the snow drove them under shelter. Jongdae submitted to being made to remain in the sleeping bag, nibbling on deer liver while Minseok pulled the last few mats of pine boughs up against the open side of their shelter, sealing them in, aside from a small gap to let the smoke of their fire out.

It gave them a little light. He had a lantern with a battery that would get them through a week’s worth of nights, if used judiciously, and candles. The storm wouldn’t last that long. They’d be fine. They had food, dry bedding, and stone over their heads. Surely they’d be fine.

“Stop worrying,” Jongdae said. “Come eat. Storms are a time for rest, not for worries.”

Minseok sighed and crawled closer. Jongdae rolled his eyes and pulled Minseok closer still. He laid the feather blanket over Minseok’s lap and held a strip of meat over his head.

Like a mother bird with a worm. Minseok glared. Jongdae laughed and ate it instead.

“You did not like my offering,” he said with a pout.

Minseok groaned. Internally, he felt Jongdae’s hilarity at how exasperated he was.

“It’ll be helpful if we’re snowed in for any length of time,” Minseok said finally. “Though I could’ve gone out with you, with my bow, and prevented your scaring me half to death.”

“But, my bonded,” Jongdae said.

He titled his head and looked up wide-eyed at Minseok, mouth slightly open. Because Minseok couldn’t kiss him, he was almost tempted to throw a punch.

“Then I would not have been able to make my dramatic gift.”

Okay, for that Jongdae deserved to get pushed over. He lay on his back laughing, and Minseok hid his face in his hands.

“Tell me of your training,” Jongdae said a while later, when the wind had kicked up and snow was spitting through the various unavoidable gaps.

By this time they were sitting side by side against the stack of pine boughs, the sleeping bag over both of their legs, the blanket over their torsos. Minseok was more than happy for a distraction from the heat of Jongdae next to him and the pressure of Jongdae’s thigh against his.

Except that as he talked, Jongdae leaned closer, until his head was on Minseok’s shoulder, murmuring questions into his collarbone. Minseok could feel his pulse under Jongdae’s cheek, thudding rapidly, and his breath high in his chest. The very air around them felt charged.

No. The air around _him_. Charged with his stupidity.

“I need to stoke the fire,” he said.

The chill outside their nest of blankets helped bring him back to his senses. Minseok was furious again, this time with himself and his pathetic lack of self-control. They might be stuck in this tiny space for days, they might be on this mountain for months. He could _not_ violate Jongdae’s boundaries, he must do better.

Jongdae made a small, irritated sound. Minseok looked over into his scowl and realized that the irritation going on was not only his own.

“Scout Minseok,” Jongdae said in a sharp voice, “why will you not kissing me?”

Minseok dropped the stick he had been using to poke the fire.

“Kiss,” he said for lack of anything better.

“What?”

“Kissing is the action. The noun is kiss. And, um. Also the verb. To kiss.”

“Thank you for the language lesson,” Jongdae drawled. “The question remains.”

“You want me to? Kiss you?”

Jongdae tilted his head to the side.

“Minseok. My bonded. I have increased the comfort of our nest, demonstrated that I am both beautiful and a skilled hunter, and demanded that you preen me. How more clear can I make myself?”

Minseok felt as if he had dropped his brain, or possibly his hold on reality, along with the stick.

“I thought you – wanted me to see how you look at home?”

“You think I parade myself like that daily in front of my nest?”

“I don’t know,” Minseok said. “I don’t know anything about it. As far as I know most bonded pairs don’t - kiss.”

“I hardly think any of either of our peoples would present himself half-unclothed but for body paint if that were not the intention.”

Which, granted, did seem rather likely in retrospect.

“Do not sit in the cold.”

Jongdae said this softly, if not as soft as the sense of invitation that came with it.

Minseok shuddered and took a deep breath before creeping back over to let Jongdae arrange the covers over him. Minseok supposed that it was better to feel awkward than angry. He thought he was doing pretty well at not going to pieces like an idiot until Jongdae slid one hand slowly over his wrist, and he felt his neck go hot, trying to tamp himself down so Jongdae wouldn’t hear.

Jongdae held his wrist tighter and nuzzled against his shoulder.

“I had no thought that a human newly bonded would be strong enough of mind to keep so quiet about intrusive thoughts,” Jongdae said. “For which I thank you, I suppose, otherwise my body would be standing proud every time we’re close. But I still can hear you, my bonded. I welcome your wanting.”

Minseok blessed the sunset and the snow that only the dim light of the fire over a meter away could illuminate his burning face.

“I thought you preferred. When you showed me your friends,” he stammered.

Minseok wasn’t sure from which of them the thrum of anticipation originated. He was sure, however, that he felt no hesitation or worry from Jongdae.

“What I prefer,” Jongdae said in a low voice, “is to play with those I care for, and not give my body carelessly. Your form is as beautiful to me as your spirit, and our minds are joined until death. Why would I refuse you?”

Minseok turned his hand over to grip Jongdae’s arm.

“Show me,” Jongdae said.

Minseok dropped the wall in his mind, let Jongdae see how his hands itched to touch, how badly he wanted to taste the curve of those lips. He let his desire burn in him. It was so easy, because in the dim firelight, the angles of Jongdae’s face were more beautiful than ever.

“Oh,” Jongdae said.

Minseok found his lap to be full of airling. Jongdae put his warm hands on Minseok’s cheeks.

“My bonded. You _do_ want me,” he murmured, and lowered his mouth.

It was such disorientation: the heat of Jongdae’s lips against his would’ve been enough to throw him off-balance, but the link between their minds yawned wide. Minseok could feel Jongdae’s eagerness, his joy. His own desire, which looped through Minseok and fed the fire between them.

It made for some pretty sloppy and distracted kissing. Minseok found that they were sitting still, breathing into one another’s mouths, hands clutching one another, and he didn’t know how much time had passed. He had been too busy feeling the give-and-take of their bond, lust and affection and – despite the short duration of time, objectively speaking – the sense of “finally” they both had.

Jongdae sat back and traced his fingers over Minseok’s face. Minseok wrapped his hands around the impossible smallness of Jongdae’s waist, licked Jongdae’s taste from his lips.

“I cannot believe you left this on your face,” Jongdae said, picking at the (itchy) flecks of blue paint still stuck to his forehead.

Minseok narrowed his eyes.

“You said it was for luck!”

Jongdae’s smile was very slow, very broad, and very bright, and it was accompanied by a flare of deep amusement across their bond. Minseok swore and flipped them so that Jongdae landed hard on his back with a low cry, then kissed him until they both gasped.

“Stop being so beautiful,” Minseok growled.

“You first,” Jongdae said.

Minseok drew Jongdae’s bottom lip between his own, sucked and bit at it, ground down against Jogndae’s hips. Jongdae groaned, low and musical. His hands scrabbled up under Minseok’s sweater.

There was a moment – brief, quiet, but Minseok was so entwined with Jongdae, so deep in their connection – when Jongdae hesitated. Not unhappy, maybe, but shy. Minseok lifted his head. He laid his hand against Jongdae’s cheek, stroked it with his thumb.

“I have never done this with a male or any of your kind,” Jongdae said. “You will have to show me, Minseok. How it is to be done between us.”

Thank all the heavens that Minseok had chosen not to hide anymore, because when his desire, his wonder, and his anticipation rose up loudly in him, Jongdae smiled like lightning illuminating the night sky and undulated his body against Minseok’s, kissed him, tongue driving deep into Minseok’s mouth.

It was so cold; snow still drifted into their shelter. They burrowed down into their pile of blankets, and Minseok took Jongdae in hand, pulling at him with the firm, slow strokes that he knew through the bond were how Jongdae brought himself to completion. Feeling that wave of pleasure rise, crest, and break and almost coming untouched himself.

“That much I knew, my bonded,” Jongdae said with laughter in his voice, his mouth against Minseok’s neck.

Not that that made Minseok shudder any less hard when Jongdae swiped his hand through the come on his stomach and grasped Minseok’s cock.

“Show me,” Jongdae said.

Minseok thought of all the times he had jerked himself, conflated with the past several days of wishing for just this thing, Jongdae’s hand on him. And Jongdae pulled fast, set his teeth into the skin of Minseok’s chest until he groaned low and added to the mess.

“Minseok.”

“Jongdae.”

Was the storm a gift given to them? Over the next 2 days, Minseok thought so. The hygiene question was tricky, and there was an unpleasant hour when the snow got deep enough to cover the smoke hole and they had to dig out while coughing with tear-streaming eyes. But mostly they lay together – first in the pile of blankets and coats and then, once snow surrounded them, shutting out the wind chill, bare in the dim light – kissing, running their hands over one another’s bodies, learning all the contours and sensitive spots. Wrapped together, legs tangled, to murmur, to sleep, to feel the bond between them hum with desire and comfort.

“Oh,” Jongdae said the first time Minseok pinned his hips to the blanket and swallowed him down. “Oh, my bonded, oh, teach me that, I want to give –“

What followed was a series of whistles that Minseok thought, given the intensity over their link, was airling curses, before he spilled down Minseok’s throat.

Jongdae was a quick study. He had a streak of wickedness besides, sending so much lust over their connection while he licked and sucked that he brought Minseok to his peak quickly enough that he might as well have been a teenager.

By the time they woke together to silence and a single tiny shaft of sunlight filtering through the stack of pine boughs behind them, Jongdae and Minseok were entwined fully, their bodies and their minds. Minseok barely knew where he ended and Jongdae began: or maybe there was no such division, anymore.

It seemed a cruelty to have to emerge from their dim, smoky space and return to duty. To war.

It was midday (Minseok counted himself lucky to have remembered to actually wind his watch during the storm) by the time they dug themselves out of the meter-plus snow. It took until mid-afternoon, with sunlight in short supply, before they made it down to the cliff. Jongdae stripped down and kissed Minseok before he leapt into the sky.

Minseok sat by the solar panel while it charged, feeling Jongdae’s happiness at being back in the sky, feeling his own mind stretch wide. Watching the snow all around them taper off into the distance to the brown of the mud at the front.

The solar panel beeped, and the communication array whirred to life. Minseok pulled out the code book, ready to prepare his message that they were back on duty, but the device immediately started spitting out uncoded text.

“BEWARE BEWARE REPEAT BEWARE BEWARE KEEP SAFE ALLIES IN DANGER BEWARE BEWARE”

Minseok stared at it before he could shake himself into action. He typed in his personal code, reported their safety.

“Lieutenant,” came back the coded message, “airlings taken. keep safe. yixing taken.”

Minseok went cold. Felt Jongdae’s question, then his alarm.

“pull back. take cover. repeat. airlings are target.”

Minseok could barely type in his confirmation before he was standing, eyes shielded, trying to mentally pull Jongdae back to him. He could feel Jongdae pushing through the air to return to him, his focus, but Minseok didn’t breathe until Jongdae stepped down onto the cliff and ran to him.

“What is it,” Jongdae rasped, hugging him close.

Clothing first. They’d do no one any good with frostbite. But the message disturbed Jongdae as much as it had Minseok.

“I was not close enough to see much,” Jongdae said. “Though there was no sign of change. What is this?”

“I don’t know.”

They argued about it, late into the night and again the next morning, even while airing out their shelter and in each other’s arms. Minseok wanted to follow orders; Jongdae wanted to continue his flights, see whether they could find out anything about what had happened to Yixing.

“Maybe if you went at night.”

Jongdae shook his head.

“My vision is insufficient in the dark.”

Around and around they went. The worst part of it was that Jongdae was right, and Minseok knew it – he just hated it. They had a duty. Not only Minseok’s duty as a soldier, but Jongdae’s duty to his fellow airling. Jongdae’s fear for Yixing, whom he had known since he was small, and his determination to help.

“I will fly faster than daylight,” Jongdae swore.

He was like an arrow, pushing himself in a straight line to the front, 3 tight, frustrating circles showing them nothing, then rocketing back to lie with his chest heaving on the cliff as Minseok sent a report.

“HOLD,” the message came back. “PROTECT ALLY.”

Minseok had never wanted to obey an order more, but he knew they wouldn’t.

That kind of flight sapped Jongdae’s energy. Minseok was more grateful than ever for the deer, because Jongdae put away enormous quantities of food and was too tired to hunt on top of it. And Minseok was too paranoid to leave him alone at the camp.

He took his rifle and ammunition bag with him the next morning when they went for their similarly frustrating flight. And the next, when he needed it.

They’d been stupid. They’d been so focused on keeping Jongdae’s flights fast and direct that they hadn’t varied his trajectory or their time of day.

Jongdae was on his way back on the third morning, close enough that Minseok could see the speck of him in the sky. So he saw, as well as felt, when something hit Jongdae in the chest, and he fell.

Minseok saw Jongdae get knocked sideways and felt his own breath leave from the sensation of impact.

He felt Jongdae’s consciousness wink out, and heard his own mental scream into the sudden silence.

He watched that tiny form plummet and saw the larger figure emerge from the trees, through the snow, toward where it would land.

In that instant, Minseok’s anguish froze into rage.

He would have time later to grieve. But he would be damned before he let the enemy have Jongdae in any form.

He was a hunter, too.

Minseok shouldered his rifle, checked his side-arm, and scooped up the food he had brought for Jongdae, his eyes never once leaving the scene at the bottom of the cliff.

He choked a little when he felt Jongdae land – a wisp of consciousness, a wave of intense pain, and quiet again.

The ammunition bag had a length of cable in it, for no other reason than it had been a convenient place to stash the cable where it wouldn’t get tangled. One hundred meters of thin wire cable. He grabbed one of Jongdae’s heavy hide gloves and scrambled down the east side of the cliffside, where, after a slide through scree, he hit a few scraggly trees. Looped the cable around one of them, and abseiled down, praying that the cable was long enough.

He had about a 5-meter drop at the end, and Jongdae’s glove was shredded from the bare metal cable, but he made it. Dropped, rolled out the energy of the fall, curled around his rifle to protect it, and came out of the roll running.

Through the scope, Minseok could see the southern soldier, now floundering back along his path through the snow. Too far even for as good a shot as Minseok was. But he knew where to go. And he was smaller, and used to snow. The southern soldier struggled, as if he hadn’t cut an efficient path to get to Jongdae.

Minseok didn’t follow the soldier directly. His cold-weather gear was white, meant to conceal him in the snow. He cut over at an angle, bent low, letting his arms and rifle butt help him cut through the snow so that he moved more quickly. Bit by bit, he gained ground.

He knew the southern soldier would speed up the second he hit the tree line and clearer ground, and from there it would be a nearly impossible chase all the way to the southern camp and whatever they were doing to airlings.

Minseok scanned the terrain while he moved.

To his right, there was a rocky outcropping just above the snow. A place where he could lie down, steady himself.

The distance would be at the very edge of his ability to shoot accurately.

But he wouldn’t miss.

He could not.

Minseok ran. He ignored the burn in his lungs and legs, pushing through the waist-deep snow to reach that rock to give himself time to set up. He was gasping hard when he made it, and dropped onto his stomach shaking, set the rifle on the rock under him.

He latched onto the ice that was his rage, sank into it as he had sunk into his bond with Jongdae, and let chill flood him, still him. He set his eye to the scope.

The first shot missed.

The second shot dropped the southern soldier, a portion of his head having dissipated into a fine mist.

Minseok slung the rifle back over his shoulder and resumed running. Now that his objective was cleared, the blank space in his mind turned into a howl of pain. Minseok only knew he was weeping from the sensation of warmth on his face. He felt nothing of his lungs’ ache anymore, or the burn of his muscles. He knew only that he had to get to Jongdae.

No matter what he found, he would get to Jongdae.

He would be with Jongdae, even if they could only be together in death.

He found Jongdae on the ground half a meter away from the southern soldier’s body, dropped when the soldier pitched sideways as he fell.

Misneok knelt and stripped off his mittens. One wing was obviously broken at the humerus and possibly the radius. Jongdae’s beak was open, tongue hanging loose, eyes filmed over.

He was so small.

Minseok gathered him up gently, hearing a low groan that he didn’t even realize was his at first.

He lifted that small, limp body to his face.

Felt shallow breath.

Minseok froze. He tried to block out his grief and fear so he could feel with his hands, listen with his ears and his heart.

Yes.

He wasn’t imagining it.

Jongdae breathed – too rapid, too shallow, but it was breath.

He was there in their link as well, a mere thread of pain, but there. Minseok flooded the bond with his relief, and Jongdae shifted ever so slightly in his hands.

“I have you,” Minseok rasped through his raw throat. “I have you, I’ve got you.”

He tried to tuck Jongdae as gently as possible into the crook of his arm. There was a flare of pain, and Jongdae panted harder.

Minseok floundered to the dead soldier and stripped him of anything useful, starting with a knife that Minseok used to cut the sleeve off the dead man’s parka, slit it open, and wrap it snugly around Jongdae with his wings folded in.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered when this process made another wave of agony flow into him.

But wrapped up and immobilized, he’d be safer. Minseok unzipped his parka, uncinched the waist, and tucked Jongdae inside, zipped it back up as much as he could so Jongdae would be warm and in the dark. Feeling Jongdae warm up next to his skin was almost as much of a comfort for him.

He wasn’t dead.

They had a true crisis on their hands, but he wasn’t dead, and if Minseok had anything to say about it, he would stay that way.

The southern soldier had some dry rations, a sidearm, and a map. His cold-weather gear was too flimsy to be worth taking. He had no communication equipment of any kind. Minseok covered the body with snow and went back along his own tracks to the rock he’d shot from, then cut across to the trees for cover.

He climbed for the rest of the day, feeling Jongdae still breathing against his chest, sometimes shifting weakly. There was nothing in the bond other than those pulses of agony. Minseok tried to send back reassurance. Mostly he concentrated on climbing as fast as he possibly could without jostling Jongdae too much. He fought the urge to open his parka and look every other minute, desperate for information but knowing that Jongdae needed to be warm and still above anything else.

The sun was low in the sky when he finally came to their camp. Clouds were gathering again on the mountaintops, and he prayed for more snow that would obscure everything that had gone down in the hills below them.

The fire had gone out. Minseok left Jongdae inside his parka while he re-lit it inside their shelter, filled the cookpot with snow, and set it by the flames. Jongdae’s parka was still down on the cliff with the communication equipment. Minseok made a puddle of his parka on top of the sleeping bag, laid Jongdae gently on it and wrapped it over him, covered him with their blanket.

By the time Minseok had pulled the mats around their shelter to hold in warmth, the fire had gotten going enough to take extra feeding and the snow was starting to melt. Minseok’s hands shook while he dug through his pack for the first-aid kit. He hated every second that he wasn’t staring at Jongdae to ensure that those shallow breaths continued. But all of this was necessary.

He decanted water into Jongdae’s wooden cup, tested its temperature. Sagged with relief to uncover Jongdae and find him still in the world. Dripped a little water into his open beak.

After a couple of drops, Jongdae shook his head weakly and swallowed.

“Oh, well done,” Minseok whispered.

Slowly, painfully, he got a few milliliters of water into Jongdae. Next: nutrients. He’d have been desperate for food at the end of his interrupted flight. Chill and injury on top of it meant that shock was likely. He couldn’t shift if he was too weak. And like any avian, the length of time from needing to eat to too weak to eat to dead was shorter than Minseok could bear to think about.

The first-aid kit had packets of dried egg yolk mixed with sugar. Minseok stirred water into this, along with an ampoule of antibiotics.

He couldn’t help remembering the expression on Jongdae’s face when he had looked at the syringe.

“I’m so sorry,” he said, forcing the mixture down Jongdae’s throat.

And the second time, a while later.

The third time, later still, Jongdae struggled against the syringe a little, clapping his beak but swallowing the slurry. Minseok’s sight blurred for a moment.

Between these awful feedings, he curled around Jongdae, trying to lend his body heat, fingers stroking Jongdae’s head. Once Jongdae perked up a little, Minseok scurried to hack off a bit of the remaining deer liver and thaw it gently without cooking it, mashing it with water to a consistency that would go through the syringe.

After the second of those feedings, Minseok could hear Jongdae again: weak and hurting, but present. He tried to reach back toward Minseok’s sending of reassurance and relief. For a few minutes, all Minseok could do was hold onto him and tremble with hope.

He dragged the bedding close to the fire so he could keep thawing and cutting meat but continue to hold Jongdae in his lap. The night and part of the next day passed this way. Minseok cradled Jongdae against him, offering up tiny bits of venison every few minutes and whispering praise when Jongdae took one, otherwise stroking Jongdae’s head feathers and dozing in small snatches.

The first time Minseok heard a faint

_my bonded_

in his head, it was all he could do not to squeeze Jongdae and hurt him.

“I’m here,” he said aloud and internally. “I have you.”

By the time the light outside was dying for the second time, Jongdae was perched on Minseok’s arm, eyes open, though he was restless with pain. He took a full meal from Minseok’s hand, then shook his head.

“Jongdae. If I give you a painkiller that can help you sleep, will you be able to shift?”

Minseok heard a wary message that felt like a “maybe.”

“It’ll have to be through the syringe.”

There was a wave of disgust and dislike before Jongdae’s unhappy agreement.

“I’m sorry,” Minseok apologized over and over while Jongdae choked the painkiller and antibiotic down.

But he did sleep, still on Minseok’s arm, his head resting against Minseok’s chest under the blanket. Minseok slept sitting up to hold him still. And in the morning, Jongdae asked to be set down, braced himself, and took his wingless form.

He came out of the change sweating with pain and with a low cry. Minseok rushed to him, pulling the knitted leggings he wore around camp over his legs, wrapping his parka around Jongdae’s torso. And himself around Jongdae.

“I know we need to set your arm,” Minseok said. “Let me just have a minute. Jongdae. I was so afraid, my god.”

“Minseok,” Jongdae said. “My bonded, I thought we were lost to one another.”

“Never.”

“You came for me.”

“Of course I did.”

Jongdae was loud in his mind again. Minseok had never been so glad of anything, even if the link was full of fear and pain. Because it was loud and present – and it was also full of admiration, relief, and joy. He had to be so careful, because of Jongdae’s arm, but Minseok kissed him, deep and desperate. They made small sounds into each other’s mouths, clung together as much as they dared, and only broke apart when Jongdae shifted the wrong way and his arm hurt him too much.

Setting any broken bone was difficult enough – setting Jongdae’s arm was particularly awful, because the pain rebounded into Minseok, and both of them trembled with watery eyes afterward. And with his arm broken in both upper and lower bones, there was no good way to splint it that Minseok could think of for the moment other than to bend it at the elbow and simply strap his arm to his chest.

“I will hate this,” Jongdae croaked at him.

“It’ll help keep you warmer?”

That Jongdae was well enough to be rude into the bond encouraged Minseok more than almost anything else. Jongdae ate, then consented to another dose of painkiller and asked for Minseok to tell him what had happened while Minseok held him.

“Good,” Jongdae mumbled to his chest when Minseok mentioned killing the southern soldier.

Not long after that, he slept again. Minseok allowed himself a few minutes to stay, to let himself feel his arms around Jongdae, Jongdae’s head against his chest. Let himself set aside the fear and struggle of the past 36 hours.

They would have to go down off the mountain. Jongdae would be unable to fly for a couple of months at least. They couldn’t scout. And he needed proper medical attention. The minute he seemed strong enough, they would go back down to camp. Minseok was already making a list in his mind of what they could leave behind, to make their trip back easier.

When he could tell that Jongdae’s sleep was deep enough to last, Minseok eased himself up and set out for the communications device. A few centimeters of snow covered it, but the solar array had been charging on and off, so it didn’t take long to be ready. He hadn’t wound his watch, and sent his identification number, along with the numeric request for the day’s code.

“STATUS REPORT” came through with the code.

“attempted capture of ally,” Minseok typed in. “unsuccessful. ally wounded. return requested.”

“get your asses down here asap,” the device beeped. “chanyeol joohyun minwoo captured. minwoo is dead. get the fuck out of there.”

“confirm,” Minseok typed with trembling fingers before he packed up his equipment, grabbed Jongdae’s frozen clothes, and hiked back up the hill.

“What is it,” Jongdae mumbled groggily the second Minseok ducked into their shelter. “Minseok. Your distress. I cannot think.”

“Shh,” Minseok said.

He combed his fingers through Jongdae’s hair until Jongdae passed back out, then stared into the fire for a few hours.

Any way he could see it, their first task had to be to get Jongdae back to camp and the medics. Whatever else was going on, surely a rescue mission would be mounted. The partners of the taken ones (Minwoo’s aside, who would be incapacitated if he was even still alive) would be unable to think of anything else. Minseok was trained for infiltration. And unlike those partners, his mind was relatively clear. Unlike Baekhyun’s would be, desperate for his bond-partner. Unlike Jongdae’s would soon be, desperate for his nest-brother.

When he woke and heard the message, Jongdae was inconsolable. He remained too weak and in too much pain to do much more than howl over the bond, a tumble of images that nearly overwhelmed Minseok: of their family; of Chanyeol laughing, flying, throwing machine parts against a wall; of guilt, worry, and fear.

“We must recover him,” Jongdae pleaded, his good hand tugging at Minseok’s sweater.

“You’re in no shape, Jongdae. We have to get you to camp, to the medic.”

He may have been weak, but that didn’t make his fury any less loud in Minseok’s mind.

“I will not,” he said. “I will not lie in a soft bed with soft doctors while my nest-brother suffers. One of my people is dead! What if Chanyeol –“

“No,” Minseok said. “No, don’t even think it.”

The link went chilly.

“Do not ask me to pretend to be naïve,” Jongdae said.

Minseok found himself subjected to a number of questions he could barely answer about the contents of both the avian and human first-aid kits. All the while, Jongdae was eating steadily, whatever he could reach. Gradually, Minseok realized that he was trying to shore up strength and figure out what combination of medicines he could take to lower his pain levels enough to leave camp but remain alert.

“You can’t,” he said.

“I will,” Jongdae said, and stuffed another fistful of partially cooked venison into his mouth. “I hope you will join me, my bonded. But you must do as you will.”

Jongdae tried to get dressed and leave as soon as he stopped eating, but he couldn’t get his boots on, and the effort of trying made his arm hurt enough that Minseok felt it. Jongdae sat on the ground and screamed with frustration.

“Give it a night,” Minseok begged. “Give yourself at least a little time.”

“What if my nest-brother has no time?”

“Jongdae.”

Minseok tried to hold him, but Jongdae turned away. He curled himself into a ball, leaning against the pile of pine boughs at the back, and closed himself off.

Minseok sat over the fire and cooked more meat for him.

Over the silent hour that followed, Minseok became aware that, as Jongdae had said during the storm, it was possible to still hear a little of what was going on over the bond despite the wall Jongdae had put up. Minseok tried to slowly, surreptitiously sink into quiet and eavesdrop without Jongdae noticing.

He was unhappy with what he overheard. It was confusing at first, coming through in fuzzy snatches, but Minseok pieced it together. Jongdae wasn’t just miserable and terrified – he was furious at Minseok for what he perceived as a lack of support. And he was determined to rescue Chanyeol. Minseok saw him mentally rehearsing how to lace his boots one-handed. Saw him glance back to see how much food there was, and where Minseok had put the first-aid kit, which was small enough to be carried on one shoulder.

And he knew Jongdae was waiting for him to sleep.

Worse still, Minesok heard the moment when Jongdae decided to pretend.

“I am sorry, Minseok,” Jongdae said, and crawled over to lean against him by the fire.

Minseok’s heart broke at it. Not because he didn’t understand: he did. He could feel Jongdae’s desperation. He knew it stemmed from love, and from the guilt of knowing that it had almost been him, but he had escaped. He even understood why Jongdae wouldn’t trust him to understand, even though they shared everything. Their bond was too new, and Jongdae’s fear was too loud.

Minseok let Jongdae feel his sorrow. It was real enough. And it disguised what lay underneath it. Their bond was new, yes, but during the storm they had been nearly as joined as two separate beings could be. He knew how stubborn Jongdae was, how loyal. How used to doing things himself. Minseok knew that he might stay awake for 2 days straight, trying to give Jongdae time to heal, and still Jongdae would slip away at the first opportunity.

He disliked the phrase “I had no choice.” There was always a choice. In this situation, there were no good ones. Minseok made the one that would keep Jongdae safe, even knowing that his bonded, his partner – to be painfully honest with himself, his brand-new, trembling, overwhelming love – would see it as betrayal.

“I know, my bonded,” Minseok said.

Jongdae looked at him in surprise, and Minseok kissed him, memorized the flavor of his mouth just in case.

“I need something comforting,” Minseok said. “Have you ever had coffee?”

Jongdae shook his head.

It made one precious, quiet period of calm between them: Minseok digging the packet out, handing it over for Jongdae to sniff, and his pleased surprise at the scent. The way they sat with their arms around one another while Minseok made coffee over their fire. Minseok felt Jongdae’s attention, as crystalline as his own, each of them committing this comfortable quiet to memory in case it was the last they ever got. Kissing each other with the most fragile tenderness, each thinking it was goodbye.

Minseok wiped the cup with the cloth he had soaked with painkiller while he pulled out the packet of coffee, squeezing every drop into it, trusting the bitterness of campfire coffee to disguise the taste.

The flare of pleasure over their connection was real at Jongdae’s first sip. He was surprised by the scent and the flavor. For a breath, he was merely delighted by this new experience, before all the rest of it rushed back. He smiled, and then his smile wobbled at the edges, and Minseok curled his hand around the back of Jongdae’s neck.

“This is a wonder,” Jongdae said.

“Finish it,” Minseok said. “The first cup is yours. It’s tradition.”

It wasn’t tradition any more than the line of blue paint had been for luck, but Jongdae drank it all and didn’t notice how Minseok wiped the cup with his sleeve before pouring his own cup of coffee.

Minseok sat with his arm around Jongdae, drinking the bitter coffee, cheek resting against Jongdae’s stiff hair, and waited for the end of it. In the meantime, he let his fingers stroke Jongdae’s neck, and sent all his gratitude and feeling over the bond. Felt the ache in Jongdae and pulled him closer, kissed his head.

Felt it happen: Jongdae noticing his weariness, the heaviness of his limbs.

“Minseok, no,” he said.

Minseok set cup down, turned, and took Jongdae’s face in his hands.

“You’re too hurt,” he said. “So I’m going to do this thing for you.”

“No. Minseok. Why would you do this?”

Minseok kissed him.

“I need you safe. And you need Chanyeol safe. So I’m going to get him for you. I’ll come back for you if I can, but if I can’t, there’s food, and you know the way. Get back to camp. Baekhyun will be there. Chanyeol will too. They’ll take care of you. Don’t go until you’re strong enough, Jongdae. I need you safe, you hear me?”

Jongdae’s eyes were already half-covered by those greyish membranes.

“No.”

“I love you,” Minseok said. “I thought I knew what I wanted before, but you’re so much more than that, Jongdae. I could never have imagined what it’s like to be bound to you. I promise I will do everything to come back to you. But if I don’t, never forget that you’re everything to me.”

Jongdae was so angry, behind the haze of the double dose of painkiller. He tried so hard to fight it, to throw Minseok’s hands off him. He failed.

Minseok knew he deserved it. He had taken Jongdae’s choice away from him, violated his trust. If by some miracle they made it through, he would abase himself in whatever way necessary to make things right.

He tucked Jongdae under the feather-filled blanket. He banked the fire, tossed the dregs of coffee and filled the cookpot with snow to melt for water. Set out some of the smoked grouse for immediate consumption and a hunk of venison to thaw, so that when Jongdae woke, he would hardly have to move to care for himself. He left his rifle and its ammunition, set next to Jongdae’s obsidian knife. Ate a good meal with one hand resting on his furious, wounded, beautiful, unconscious bond-partner.

He took his own knife and sidearm, but that was it. Either he would make it to camp or he would make it into another life. He kissed Jongdae’s cheek, checked the fire one last time, and slipped out into the darkness.

He used the cable to abseil down the cliff again. Darkness made no difference. He had done it once before. He knew to bounce down gently, to wrap the pika skin he’d brought around the cable. He knew about that long drop at the bottom. He knew, thanks to all those days of watching through Jongdae’s eyes, which way to go.

Minseok angled vaguely west through the snow during the night, trying to reach the cover of trees by dawn. Dumped his white parka once the snow thinned out and ran forward in his dark sweater and pants, letting his motion keep him warm. He made it to the trees when the sky was still only the barest grey and continued creeping south. He crossed a stream and drank, let himself catch his breath.

Just after dawn, he felt Jongdae wake. Felt his rage and despair.

Minseok stopped, breathed. Gathered his mind.

 _I will do this_ , he thought. _I love you._

Minseok shut the bond down. He ran.

By mid-afternoon, he was crouched under a bush near the north end of the southerners’ camp. His mouth was dry and every one of his muscles ached, but Minseok lay with his chin in the dirt and watched the movements of the soldiers. The strange tent was mere meters away. The people who went in and out of it wore uniforms unlike those Minseok had learned about during his training and scout missions.

And there had been one – maybe two – very strange-looking people indeed, all over brown, the same color as soil, with blurred edges. Minseok couldn’t tell whether they were humans who had rolled in mud or something else.

He lay under the bush and watched. The camp was too quiet, as it had been for the weeks of their scouting, though it was still busy enough that he would be noticed. He’d have to wait for darkness. In the meantime, Minseok examined the movements of everyone he saw. There was no sign of the airlings. But if medical equipment had been carried into that tent, and if Minwoo – gods, Minwoo, a red-tailed hawk in avian form, gregarious and friendly, his partner Taehwan just the same … if Minwoo was dead …

That tent was where Minseok would start.

He waited, through the short hours of the afternoon and the long hours of dusk. He watched the shift change. Watched the camp go quiet. Watched the perimeter patrols, and knew where the holes were. Waited. When the time came, he moved centimeter by centimeter, rising out of the bush he lay under, until he was free of it and had a clear path forward.

He drew his sidearm, loaded it, removed the safety. He ran.

Forward, stop. To the left, stop. Forward, stop. Wait for the two strolling soldiers, cigarettes in their mouths, to pass. To the right, stop.

Only one more run left through the darkness, and under the canvas of that tent, to whatever lay inside, still lit up despite the lateness of the hour.

He made it to the back wall of the tent and listened. There was a burst of conversation, and an ebb. When the ebb had lasted several minutes, Minseok lifted the canvas and crawled under.

Inside the tent it was bright; he heard the whirr of machinery. There were cots on one side, on the other perches. On these, Yixing and Chanyeol, with wires wrapped around them, rigid with stress. Joohyun lay on a white table behind them, similarly wire-wrapped. Minseok went cold with fear and anger. He stood.

Yixing’s and Chanyeol’s heads snapped toward him. Chanyeol cried out. Minseok scanned the tent: no one was around. He didn’t know why they both looked so alarmed as he moved toward them.

And then couldn’t move, because the ground surged up to tangle around his feet.

Because the – what?

Minseok pulled against the soil trapping his feet, but it held him fast. Chanyeol and Yixing shifted on their perches and made soft cries.

A humanoid shape rose up out of the ground – all brown, as he had seen, blurry around the edges. Not covered in mud, Minseok guessed, but made of it.

“What do you do here,” the being said in the voice of a thousand insect wings rattling against one another.

“Let them go,” Minseok said.

The being titled its head.

“Let what go? These animals?”

“They’re not,” Minseok said. “They aren’t –“

The mud-being hissed, and Minseok’s bond with Jongdae yawned wide with anger, pain, determination.

Minseok turned. Jongdae was there, parka zipped haphazardly over one arm, pale, teeth bared, knife held in one hand, mud on his face, panting.

Beautiful.

“Small things,” the mud-being said.

Minseok watched the soil rise up around Jongdae’s feet. Jongdae whistled in his throat and threw the obsidian knife. It sliced through the wires trailing from around Chanyeol to a machine on the ground.

“Oh, I’m an idiot,” Minseok thought.

He drew his own, shorter knife and threw it at the wires surrounding Yixing.

Only two of the three severed, but by that point, Chanyeol had changed. Minseok had forgotten how big he was – both tall and broad, and despite the shadows under his eyes, with a fury that filled the tent, even as southern soldiers crowded in.

“What,” the mud-being said.

Chanyeol grabbed the last wire surrounding Yixing and yanked it out of the machine. Yixing shifted and dived for the knives, tossed the black one to Jongdae but kept Minseok’s. Chanyeol crouched in front of Joohyun’s form; Yixing squared up beside him, knife up. Minseok felt the ground release him and ran to them, standing next to Yixing with his sidearm drawn as Jongdae took his place next to his nest-brother.

The soldiers raised their rifles.

“Go, Yixing,” Minseok muttered under his breath. “One of us has to get out, you have to tell them.”

“Take Joohyun,” Chanyeol said. “We will make as much of a delay as we can.”

“Ready,” the southern team leader said.

“I will not,” Yixing said.

“Aim – “

“No,” the mud-being said.

Soil crawled up the southern soldiers, trapping them, weighting their arms until all those rifle barrels lowered.

Six more bipedal forms rose up out of the dirt.

“What is this,” one of the new ones said, in the same insect-rattling voice as the first. “Where are the animals?”

“These are the animals,” the first one said.

“Explain,” the six new ones said in unison.

Chanyeol snarled and changed form, flew at the mud-beings with his massive talons outspread, but met only deflection and avoidance until he collapsed to the ground, unfeathered and panting, and Jongdae rushed to crouch over him with the knife raised.

“Our cousins of the air,” one of the mud-beings said.

“You are myths,” another said.

Yixing stepped forward. Minseok stepped with him, pistol held ready.

“Are you the people of the earth?” he asked.

“Groundlings?” Jongdae said. “They are chicks’ tales.”

“We are not,” one of the mud-people said. “As you are not. We are the people of the south, who walk through the earth and shape it to our form.”

“We are the people of the north, who see the air and ride its paths,” Yixing said. “Cousins. For twenty nests we have longed for you.”

“Cousins,” the mud-person said. “There is no time long enough to erode our memory of you.”

The 7 groundlings turned as one to the southern soldiers.

“You told us they were beasts,” they said in unison.

“They are,” the southern officer snapped. “You see them, taking the form of animals.”

“You hurt them,” one groundling said. “Our cousins of the air. You ended the living of our cousin. You cut him apart and looked at the secret parts of him.”

“No different from – “ the southern officer said, but the mud surrounding him crawled up his body, covered and entered his mouth, crawled up his nose, held him while it choked him, kept him upright and struggling until the life went out of his eyes, then dropped him to the ground.

“Show us the truth of this,” the groundlings said as one.

Yixing, Chanyeol, and Jongdae stepped forward. Jongdae pulled Minseok with him. They reached out. Minseok felt his hands covered by damp, cool soil, heavy against his skin but not unpleasant, and a pushing at his mind like at the choosing.

Minseok thought of everything he knew about the war – his small nation, trying to hold the line against invaders. Privation and fear. The long, quiet struggle of life at the camp. The beauty of the airlings. The boredom and focus of scouting. Jongdae. First and last, Jongdae: saving him, loving him, betraying him to save him again. The small, desperate core of him that wanted only one thing: to live long enough to earn Jongdae’s forgiveness.

The groundlings drew back, and Jongdae did not step away from him.

“We reject,” the groundlings said. “Untruths have been given to us. This ends.”

The living southern soldiers slid toward the door of the tent, cried out to have the very earth refuse to hold steady under their feet.

“Cousins,” the groundlings said in unison, “take your injured home. We will come to you once we have dealt with those who lied to us.”

They dropped into the ground, each leaving behind one of the smooth, bowl-like depressions that had so perplexed Minseok for all this time.

“Joohyun,” Yixing said.

She lay on the table, eyes lidded and breath shallow, as Jongdae’s had been.

“She is too weak to change,” Yixing said.

“Who can fly?” Jongdae asked.

“I can,” Chanyeol said.

Minseok stripped off his shirt, and they made a hammock of sorts, tied Joohyun securely to Chanyeol’s chest.

“Fly safely, nest-brother,” Jongdae said. “If I get to the camp and find you not there, I will chase you into the land behind the sun and make you sorry for it.”

Chanyeol whistled and rubbed his beak against the side of Jongdae’s face.

Yixing had no qualms about stripping the dead southerner of his clothing and boots, despite the corpse’s bulging eyes and the foamy mud that had dribbled from his mouth. Yixing was unsteady on his feet, with deep shadows under his eyes. Jongdae, with a wry glance at Minseok, dug into his pocket and handed over a handful of hickory nuts and venison that Yixing stuffed into his mouth.

The noise from the camp was chaos. They had no trouble ducking out of the tent and into the trees. Both airlings were exhausted and wounded; Minseok was hardly in better shape, so their progress was painfully slow. Minseok made them stop for water at every stream. He tried to convince them to rest until dawn, but Yixing would only say “I must see Joonmyun,” and keep walking.

Minseok didn’t argue. He could feel the tangle of Jongdae’s emotions. There would be time later for apologies: while they trudged through the dark woods, Minseok sent only encouragement and relief through their link. He had an arm linked with each airling, practically dragging them along. Even though they were the ones insistent on moving forward.

A couple of hours after dawn, they heard the approach of a vehicle. Minseok braced, drew his sidearm, until Yixing cried out and ran toward it.

Minseok put his arm around Jongdae’s waist and hauled him toward the noise. When they reached the jeep, Joonmyun and Yixing were standing with their foreheads touching and hands clasped. Joonmyun had tears dripping off his chin.

“Help me,” Jongdae whispered. “I cannot stand anymore.”

Minseok felt guilt flare in him. He pulled Jongdae to the jeep and helped him climb into the front seat, belted him in. He did not belt himself in, so he could lean forward from the back seat and grasp Jongdae’s good arm while they bounced up and over the ridge to camp.

When the jeep stopped in front of the medical cabin, Jongdae’s face was white and his mouth pinched with pain. Minseok practically carried him inside, where the medics were waiting. The group of them were enough to keep Jongdae from stopping to crane his neck toward the other patients on the ward and get him into a bed.

Minseok did crane his neck. Chanyeol, with a drip in one arm and Baekhyun trying to cover every centimeter of him, looked over and waved. Joohyun was unfeathered, lying still under a pile of blankets with Seungwan curled next to her. He fed his relief along his link to Jongdae.

When he turned, the medics had helped Jongdae pull off his boots, and Minseok saw the green-embroidered strips of leather around each ankle. With everything Minseok had done, however angry Jongdae had been, he came down off that mountain, hurting and weak, wearing a symbol that he still chose their bond.

Minseok didn’t remember how he crossed the space to Jongdae’s side. He held Jongdae’s hand while they cut the bandages to free Jongdae’s arm and splinted it, set a drip in his hand, and gave him yet another dose of painkillers.

“More of this,” Jongdae murmured. “I hate it.”

“I know, I’m sorry,” Minseok said.

“Be here when I wake,” Jongdae said. “That is all I ask.”

Minseok was. They only kept Jongdae in the clinic overnight, but he spent the next several days mostly in bed in their cabin, Minseok tasked with feeding him up and keeping him warm. Minseok only ever left his side long enough to scrub down, change clothes, or fetch food from the mess hall. There was a sore spot in the link between them that they both shied away from, content for the moment to lie tangled in one narrow bed and soak in their relief and the comfort of safety.

A report came on the second day that two battalions of southern soldiers had tumbled up out of the earth halfway to the capitol, but that the ground in front of them rose up like a wave and drove them to retreat, until they dragged themselves to back the front to find all their war machines bogged down in mud and half their supplies spoiled.

There was talk of armistice.

The day after that, three groundlings rose up in the center of camp just as morning muster ended. There were a couple of tense moments, until Yixing, Chanyeol, and Jongdae stepped forward to clasp arms with them. Minseok didn’t even pretend not to listen in. The conversation, wholly without contractions, seemed largely to be about things Minseok had understood to be mythology.

“We have forgotten the songs,” one groundling said. “Time is ever a friend to us, but this knowledge has worn away.”

“We remember them,” Yixing said. “We sing the songs to our cousins of water in the west every autumn, and tell stories of tides and migrations that we do not understand. But none among us remembers that anyone ever answered the call.”

“We will go,” the groundlings said. “When the liars have returned to the soil that will make them whole. Let us go west and sing, and discover whether our cousins remember.”

“Baekhyun,” Chanyeol said, “shall we go to the sea and sing?”

Baekhyun, who shadowed Chanyeol as closely as Minseok did Jongdae, gave a shaky laugh before he agreed.

“Who will go to discover whether there really is a great dragon in the east?” Yixing mused.

Minseok took that as his cue to drag his bond-partner away from all the talk of legend and adventure and into bed for a nap.

Back in their cabin, Jongdae arranged himself carefully on Minseok to avoid hurting his arm. Minseok waited until Jongdae was still before he lowered his own arms around Jongdae’s shoulders.

“A valiant effort to deter me from any thoughts of dragons in the wild,” Jongdae murmured against his neck. “Though you know it will be futile. We must have some task to occupy ourselves when the war is over, my bond-mate.”

Minseok wasn’t sure whether it was the dragon or the final phrase that kept him awake. Either way, it was no hardship to hold Jongdae while he slept.

Still. A bond-mate deserved better than one ragged lieutenant with only three changes of clothes to his name and not even his own rifle. It was easy to obtain a couple of strips of dark leather, and only slightly harder to procure some bright purple thread. Finding time to work on them was the real challenge. But by the time Jongdae was cleared to go to the bathhouse for a proper soak, Minseok had jesses wrapped around his own ankles when he stripped down.

As much as Jongdae liked the bathhouse, his first visit was short by necessity, so that they didn’t make inappropriate use of it. It was tricky, trying to get his hands on as much of Jongdae as he wanted in that little bed without bumping Jongdae’s arm, but Minseok made it work sufficiently that they were both sticky and panting by the end, Jongdae looking more beautiful than ever with kiss-swollen lips and a couple of marks sucked into the skin at the base of his neck.

“I have not forgiven you yet,” Jongdae said.

But the natural smile-curve of his mouth was pronounced, and Minseok felt amusement and affection from him.

“I wouldn’t expect you to.”

“You will not do that again, my bond-mate,” Jongdae said a while later, his fingers in Minseok’s hair while Minseok lay with his face tucked against Jongdae’s neck.

“I won’t promise,” Minseok said. “Not if your safety’s at stake.”

Jongdae tugged at his hair.

“And if I promise never to give thought to leaving you behind again? Will you do the same?”

Minseok raised his head to look down into those beloved dark eyes.

“All right,” he said. “Knowing that you’ll just come after me anyway.”

Jongdae grinned.

“Of course,” he said. “And I can track you anywhere.”

Once things calmed down a little from the abrupt ending of both the camp’s crisis and possibly the war itself – not to mention the discovery of a whole new kind of people – Joonmyun sent a group of recruits up the mountain to retrieve Minseok’s and Jongdae’s belongings. They all looked pretty lost, given the likelihood that they had trained and hoped for bond-partners who might never materialize now. Joonmyun sent all the ones who volunteered up the mountain, just so they’d have something to do. Minseok pointed out the nut and fruit trees and the location of the trout stream. Jongdae showed them his favorite hunting routes around the mountain, and off they went.

It was odd to see Jongdae wandering around camp in Minseok’s uniforms. Not that Minseok didn’t melt a little when Jongdae took to wearing the pale cable-knit sweater his grandmother had knitted for him over his knit leggings, now much mended (by Minseok) after their rescue adventure.

Having established that Baekhyun was no threat, Jongdae tolerated his presence. The four of them spent a lot of their recuperation time in Minseok and Jongdae’s quarters, listening to the nest-brothers’ constant chatter.

“You _did_ live in the woods like bears,” Chanyeol laughed when he asked about their life up on the mountain. “Crouched up under a little rock for your den. Very small, growly bears, so serious all the time, eating up the cute woodland creatures.”

This was not inaccurate. Minseok laughed, but Jongdae threw a pillow at his nest-brother.

“I would’ve been happy to eat a cute woodland creature every once in a while,” Baekhyun said.

“No, my bonded, we eat rations like modern people,” Chanyeol said.

Baekhyun groaned.

“Min, you don’t even know, he eats them _dry_.”

“Dried cubes of vegetable!” Chanyeol chirped. “I like them. They are crunchy.”

Baekhyun must’ve sent something rude over their bond, because Chanyeol rolled across the floor and tried to fit himself in Baekhyun’s lap. When that didn’t work, he pulled Baekhyun across his legs instead and rubbed his face against Baek’s until Baekhyun grinned helplessly and pinched him.

“Jongdae, is it not happiness to be bonded?” Chanyeol asked once he had succeeded in draping all his limbs around Baekhyun and trapping him.

“It is,” Jongdae said.

Minseok probably also wore a helpless grin, given the amount of affection that Jongdae poured into him.

“I like kissing the best,” Chanyeol said. “But who puts it in, between you? We have tried both ways, but I prefer when Baek puts it in me.”

Minseok grimaced and saw his wince reflected on Baekhyun’s face.

“What?” Jongdae said.

“Who puts it in?” Chanyeol repeated as if speaking to a child.

Jongdae’s eyes went narrow.

“In where?”

Chanyeol howled, laughing so hard that he let Baekhyun go and lay on his back.

“He doesn’t know where!” he yelled. “Scout Minseok, what did you do on that mountain?”

“Hey, you didn’t know either until I showed you, don’t be a jerk,” Baekhyun said, and smacked Chanyeol’s chest.

Chanyeol pouted. Minseok couldn’t decide whether he wanted to laugh or to disappear. Given the amount of suspicion Jongdae radiated next to him, probably not laugh.

“I think you’ve annoyed your nest-brother enough for today,” Baekhyun said. “Let’s go find a cute woodland creature to eat.”

“And then we will have sex?”

Minseok did laugh then, at Baek’s red face and flapping hands.

“God, I don’t know! Probably, you’re nothing if not persistent.”

“You should let your bond-mate put it in you, Jongdae, it feels wonderful,” Chanyeol said before he sauntered out the door.

Baekhyun sighed.

“This is a really weird time to say this, but thank you. I know you did it for Jongdae, but thank you for bringing him back to me,” Baekhyun said. “He’s terrible, and I think I would literally die if I couldn’t have him anymore.”

“I know how you feel,” Minseok said.

Baekhyun shut the door carefully behind him. As expected, Jongdae waited not at all.

“In. Where,” he growled.

It was certainly among the more pleasant ways Minseok could think of to spend a winter’s afternoon.

“Showing you my memories will only make you annoyed at Baekhyun,” Minseok said, and grinned at Jongdae’s scowl.

He leaned in to kiss Jongdae until want flared across their bond.

“Let’s just try it.”

He helped Jongdae off with his clothing and made no rush of removing his own under Jongdae’s gaze and the sensation of Jongdae’s desire and curiosity. Minseok fetched the little bottle that lay tucked in the back of his footlocker and wrapped himself around Jongdae.

“When the use of both hands returns, I will touch every part of you,” Jongdae murmured under his lips.

“That’s essentially what we’re doing,” Minseok laughed.

He pulled Jongdae’s hand down and made his mind wide open so that Jongdae would feel it doubly when he breached himself – only one finger, to start. It had been a while, and they had time.

Jongdae’s surprise made his eyes and mouth wide.

“There? And it is good?”

Minseok dragged his finger out, arched back down onto it while he kissed Jongdae’s shoulder, feeding the slide of it into their link.

“Oh,” Jongdae breathed. “How have I not known of this? Why did we not do this before?”

“It takes a bit of time and preparation,” Minseok said, and they both sighed when he added a finger. “And something slippery to ease the way.”

Jongdae’s bottom lip stuck out anyway, and Minseok sucked on it, until he needed to duck his head when Jongdae cupped his balls, fingertips still brushing Minseok’s hand to feel how he worked himself.

“It will be like my friends,” Jongdae whispered. “You will have me inside you.”

“Yes. When I’m ready. Without preparation, it hurts.”

“But the preparation you enjoy.”

“Yes.”

Jongdae touched his forehead to Minseok’s. Minseok could feel him listening.

“Help me,” he whispered.

“Oh,” Jongdae breathed when his hand twined with Minseok’s. “The heat of you, my bonded. I want that.”

“You’ll have it.”

“Let me.”

Minseok drew his hand away and groaned at Jongdae’s longer, callused fingers in him. Jongdae’s delight at this glowed in Minseok’s mind.

“How soon,” Jongdae said.

Minseok grinned.

“It’s better if you draw it out.”

“I know this much. I do not want better, I want now.”

“Impatient.”

“Yes impatient. Every minute I want to kiss you, Minseok. The camp is full of people. I am impatient to be away from them and have you to myself. I am impatient to eat meals in a loud room and stand in the mud to say my name aloud every morning, when we could be in this bed together. I am impatient to leave this stupid bed behind and sleep together again under our blanket. I am impatient for you, bond-mate.”

He drove his fingers deep inside Minseok.

“Because I will have you, and you will show me how this is done between us. And then you will have me, and I will know.”

Minseok swore and pushed Jongdae onto his back, sank onto him, both of them moaning at the dual sensation.

How would they ever learn to draw things out? The link between them was so immediate when they were naked and wanting in one another’s hands. It took little more than a few bounces and some judicious squeezing before Jongdae arched beautifully and cried out, his good hand clutching Minseok’s thigh.

Easier to be slow about it when Jongdae demanded that it was his turn, the whole thing being new to him. Despite his surprise and discomfort, he was bossy about being fingered open “too slowly, this is not a scouting mission,” until Minseok laughed at him and stilled his hand completely, refusing to move until Jongdae let out a series of whistled curses.

“Oh,” he said when Minseok finally pushed inside him. “The appeal of this is clear.”

Anything else he said once Minseok started to move was in his native language, but Minseok understood from the bond that it was all positive.

“Are there any other parts of mating you have kept from me?” Jongdae asked afterward, while they soaked themselves into a stupor in the bathhouse.

“Only different configurations.”

Jongdae stared at him.

“How many configurations?”

“As many as we can think of, I suppose.”

“I can think of a lot,” Jongdae said later.

Minseok, who had been party to that train of thought and was having a stern conversation with himself about their impending need to get up out of the water currently hiding his body’s enthusiasm for Jongdae’s thoughts, snorted.

“We will have many things to try on our journey east,” Jongdae purred.

The journey east that no one had planned or agreed to. Not that Minseok had any real hope of getting out of it.

The nest-brothers made pests of themselves, having no sense of privacy at all about their sex lives and making extensive comparisons, which led to invasive questions about prior activities, which neither Minseok nor Baekhyun would answer despite loud, drawn-out airling whining.

“My bond-mate is longer,” Chanyeol said. “Though yours is thicker, and very pretty.”

“Prettier than yours in every way,” Jongdae said. “His ass is almost as pretty as mine.”

“Can you please have this conversation where we don’t have to hear it?” Baekhyun pleaded.

“Oh no, your discomfort is half our enjoyment,” Chanyeol said.

The recruits came back after a week and a half, loaded down with all the gear from on top of the mountain, including all their frozen-solid stores and having presumably stripped every nut and persimmon tree on the mountain bare. Jongdae had reached the point where he was supposed to start using his arm a little, and happily claimed all his skins, especially the deer hide.

They passed the winter healing and working. Reading the reports of political developments and making short trips out to the former front to reassure themselves that the southerners were really leaving. Groundlings came to visit sporadically, until it seemed that a trip west to sing to the ocean and see what came out of it was actually going to happen.

Yixing was teaching Kibum the airlings’ ocean-calling songs. His voice was lovely, and his face looked peaceful for the first time in years.

By spring, when a moderate-sized party would set out west and a duo would set out east (dragons, _really_ ), Jongdae could still forecast storms with his left arm, but his flight was as fast and true as ever. He had worked all winter, until Chanyeol started calling him “killer of all cute things,” and Minseok was kitted out almost like an airling, in his leather leggings and feather-quilted tunic, if without the benefit of wyvern-hide boots.

He felt strange in such clothes, but the month previous, the army had been reduced to a small standing force and all but the most senior air scouts separated and sent home to be whatever they could make of themselves. Some of the younger bonded pairs had taken up with unbonded recruits, with plans for trading or cultural exchange, or some such thing.

It would be a much longer trip, but Minseok and Jongdae only took one bag each this time, both on his two feet. Their goodbyes to Chanyeol and Baekhyun had been difficult and sad, but there was no one else Minseok could regret. His family had sent letters wishing him well on his long, secret “one last mission for the army,” and they’d be waiting for him on his return. Joonmyun and Yixing would remain where they were, one small outpost on the frontier where groundlings, airlings, and humans could always find them.

Whether there was a dragon who lived in the land of the sunrise or not, Minseok didn’t much care. He wanted only the sky arching over his head and the sound of wind through trees. He wanted quiet and hard work, green around him and blue above him.

And Jongdae. First, last, always Jongdae, in his head and by his side.

“Walk faster, Minseok. By nightfall, do you think we will see unfamiliar trees?”

Minseok clasped Jongdae’s hand and walked faster, as directed. With all the things he wanted, which he already had.


End file.
